Bentz Plagemann

THE STEEL COCOON

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Text from Reader's digest condensed books: volume 4, 1958, autumn selections.

"The Steel Cocoon," copyright © 1957 by Bentz Plagemann, is published by The Viking Press. Inc. 625 Madison Ave. New York 22. V. V.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bentz Plagemann was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1913. For about eight years before the outbreak of World War II he was a bookseller in Cleveland, Chicago and New York. From 1942 to 1945 Plagemann served in the Hospital Corps of the U. S. Navy, as a pharmacist's mate on a destroyer, and later on an LST where he was in charge of the ship's medical department, without a doctor, but with two assistants.

While his LST was fitting out for the second Normandy landings, Mr. Plagemann contracted polio. One week before his illness, after a formal inspection, his LST was chosen medical flagship of its group and later acquitted itself well in removing the wounded from France to England.

After receiving a medical discharge from the Navy, Mr. Plagemann turned to writing. His story of his own battle with polio, My Place to Stand, was well received in 1949. The hilarious This Is Goggle was a Condensed Book Club selection in the autumn of 1955.

Mr. Plagemann enjoys travel and plans to go to Italy or France with his wife to work on his next — it will be his sixth — book.

THE STEEL COCOON

CHAPTER 1

IT IS possible that the condition of war is agreeable to most men. Aside from the killing and the being killed, and the long periods of enforced idleness, almost everything about it is pleasant. It was a long time after World War II before Tyler Williams allowed himself to accept this reflection. But he discovered that when he could not sleep at night, or when he awoke in the darkness, he would take up his memories of the Navy with a secret pleasure.

It seemed to him that he could hold these memories in his hand, so to speak, as a child might hold an old-fashioned Easter egg of papier-mache, and that, if he narrowed his eyes in the darkness and looked into the small aperture in the end, he could see the complete world of his memory, all cut paper and gilt and brightness, waiting there, never changing, alive in another dimension of time.

Most especially did he possess in this private way his memories of the USS Ajax, the destroyer on which he had served in the North Atlantic and the North Sea. At such a moment the Ajax still existed, the green seas still streamed, salt-glistening, from the weather deck, as the bow climbed from a wave through into the sparkling sun. "Never go to the weather deck when the green seas run!" he would hear McNulty shout, and in the darkness his eyes would ache quickly from the remembered brilliance of those days.

Oddly enough, the memories he relived most vividly were those of the shakedown cruise in 1942, while they were being prepared and preparing themselves, to go into action. For the fulcrum of his memories was not the action of war itself, but a man, his old chief, Alexander Bullitt. The pleasure of his recollections was troubled by that presence. A man must live with himself, man who respects himself must feel that he has behaved with honor. Had he, Tyler Williams, done so? With his stubborn loyalty to Bullitt had he failed the others, and even helped to bring about the tragedy that followed? He needed to resolve that in his mind.

Often, on these nights, his sleeplessness would force him out of bed, and he would feel guilty, standing in the moonlit bedroom, as if his preoccupation with the past betrayed his present happiness. In the bed beside his, Maria would be beautiful in sleep, and vulnerable, so that his heart went out to her in a quick rush of tenderness. She had no part in this story of the past. He had not even known her then, and there were moments when he had thought never to find his own life again, much less this fulfillment of marriage. C^h, he was a man who had blessings to count. Thinking this, he would leave the room quietly and look in at Billy's room. And Billy would be sleeping as only a boy of nine can sleep, with his arms curled upward, and a blessed look on his face, the immortal purity of childhood.

But old ghosts are hard to lay, and sometimes, on these wakeful nights, Tyler Williams would find himself, trousers and sweater pulled over his pajamas, sneakers on his bare feet, pacing the walks of the college campus he loved. He had found his life there, in teaching, even before the war. He was a man born to teach, and he loved the classrooms by day, and now the campus at night, with the dark, arching elms, and the moon-gilded clock tower, and the chapel spire. The memory of the limited, narrow man he had been when he was young haunted him, but, more than that, the past haunted him — distilled, on troubled nights like this, into the memory of a single night, and he was on the deck of the Ajax again, kneeling beside Bullitt, bathing his broken face, and looking into the dark void behind his eyes. Time, and the war, had made him the man he was, but — oh, God! — not, he hoped, at the sacrifice of other men. And he would walk the campus in the moonlight, until the chimes in the clock tower intervened with present reality, to diminish the echoes of the past.

In the sick bay on the AJax, order existed, and every day was very much like any other day. It was one of the few quarters of the ship where a man might shut a door behind him. In the morning, after an early mug of coffee, Williams began the preparations for the day as Chief Bullitt had instructed him to do. On the treatment table, and on the narrow shelves that ran about the compartment, he arranged the equipment, the bottles, the trays of instruments in antiseptic solution, the sterile gauze and the bandages.

When everything was in order he would take his place on a high stool in the corner, where the sick-call book lay open on a small metal lectern. On the sea shelf above this lectern were his Hospital Corps Manual, his notebooks from Hospital Corps School, and copies of the Bible and Thoreau's IValden, the only personal books he had room for in his sea bag. His duty during the hours of sick call was to assist in treatment, and to enter each man's complaint, diagnosis and treatment in the sick-call book.

By eight a.m. Chief Bullitt would have appeared, lounging in the doorway in his impeccably clean, starched khaki, his chief's cap fixed to one side of his lean, saturnine head, probing his gold-filled teeth with a gold toothpick, in the same way his skeptical eyes probed for psychic faults in the ailing men who came to him. In those early days he did not acknowledge Williams, or even speak to him, aside from instructing him in the performance of his duties.

Williams had first met Chief Bullitt on the dock at Norfolk, where the chief sat on a packing case filled with bottles of blood plasma, smoking a cigarette. There was something about the chief which suggested the nervelessness of some large, articulated insect, a praving mantis, perhaps, in Navy khaki. Physically he was slender, browned, ageless. He held himself with an elegant, angular erectness, and his attitude showed that he knew himself to be superior. When Williams presented himself as his new assistant on the Ajax, Chief Bullitt acknowledged him with a look of insolent contempt, one knee crossed over the other, his cigarette held at a right angle to his thin, tanned hand. "And what are your qualifications for the Hospital Corps?" he asked. "A job in a Liggett's drugstore?"

"No," Williams said. "I was an English instructor."

"Mercy," Bullitt said. He shook his head as if he had been beset by flies. "I thought I had seen everything. Well," he went on, with an air of resignation, "we may not be able to set broken bones together, but at least we can always split an infinitive."

Williams said nothing.

"I suppose you have a wife somewhere," Bullitt said, drawing at his cigarette, "and one and a half children."

"No," Williams said, stifling his anger, "I am not married,"

"Well," Bullitt said, "at least I will be spared the boring details of your domestic life."

Williams reminded himself that presumably there was nothing personal in this attitude of contempt. He had encountered it before. It was the instinctive withdrawal, he told himself, of the career military man who finds the enforced company of civilians tiresome, with their untidy thoughts, and their undisciplined attachment to families ashore, Williams had yet to learn of the larger area of Chief Bullitt's contempt. Nineteen years in the enlisted ranks of the Navy, the absence of the mature responsibilities of family life, the endless, intimate association with men lesser than himself, in a daily life where no major decisions were required of him, had given him a contempt which embraced nearly all men. The fastidious withdrawal, the almost fierce detachment which Williams found in him was there not only for Williams, but for all the world as well.

But Tyler Williams had cultivated his own brand of detachment. He had come to the dock at Norfolk from long months of service in a wartime Naval hospital. He had seen too much of suffering and death; the long wards filled with casualties from battles oil North Africa, the amputees, the maimed, the halt, the blind. He had heard too often the cries in the dark of hospital nights; and, in defense, he had girded himself with what he thought was a sublime indifference to the sufferings and the problems of others, in order that he might not be destroyed.

And with an indifference even to their crotchets, he told himself, looking at the set, proud, ugly face of Alexander Bullitt; for with his distinction he was yet one of the ugliest men Tyler Williams had ever seen, with a great beak of a nose, a wide, thin, arbitrary mouth, and deep-set, exhausted eyes. It is possible at that moment, in their mutual withdrawal, that they underestimated each other. Here was a military man, Williams thought, a man limited by the circumstances of his experience, yet with pride arising from that experience: pride both in Navy tradition and in the military tradition of excess. From the look of him it was obvious that he must have spent a good part of his Navy years in the bars of Hong Kong, Pearl Harbor and Norfolk; and an almost equal part of that time tapering off with medical alcohol in the sick bay. Yet he would be pitiless with himself, as well as with others. A Navy man had to be able to drink and roust about all night, if he liked, and yet stand muster, with merciless self-discipline, in the morning.

But Williams would, in this troubled year of 1942, with half the world in flames, accept Bullitt on his own terms. He had no choice.

In the mornings, on the Ajax, Chief Bullitt would take his place silently, with a certain implicit arrogance, in the one chair in the sick bay, a light chair of aluminum, upholstered in noncombustible plastic. He did not rise when Doctor Claremont appeared, but if Doctor Claremont spoke to him first he would, without rising, remove his chief's cap with a sweeping gesture, bow his head and say, "Good morning. Doctor,'" his tone laced with a subtle mockery. Doctor Claremont, with his young, tired, unhappy face, stood through sick call, leaning backward, diffident, with the hesitation of an intern just turned doctor. Doctor Claremont looked at the area of a patient's complaint; Chief Bullitt looked at the patient's eyes. And because Claremont had not challenged Bullitt on that first day, when Bullitt failed to rise and offer him the chair, and did not now know how to rebuke him for the mockery of his address, the order of precedence in the sick bay had been irrevocably established. It was Bullitt who filled the small room with authority, as if even the possession of a medical degree were secondary here, in the closed, private world of the Navy.

When everything was ready, the upper half of the sick-bay door was opened into the midship passageway. On the lower half of the door was a shelf which could be raised, and on which a man might lean his elbows while he waited. If a closer scrutiny was necessary, the lower half of the door was opened and the man came inside, to stand uncomfortably in the small, cleared space between the three men, regarded with skepticism by Chief Bullitt, with scientific detachment by Claremont, with curiosity and ignorance by Williams.

"My back aches, Doc. Down here somewhere. I musta pulled it on a ladder."

"Mister Claremont," Chief Bullitt said, removing the gold toothpick, and uncrossing and crossing his legs, "is a doctor and a gentleman. No familiarity is permitted from a slob like you."

"Yes, sir. Yes, Doctor."

The lower door was opened. The unhappy, nervous boy came in. He pulled out his shirt as instructed and turned, feeling on his back the thin, cool, tactile fingers of Doctor Claremont, the cynical eyes of Chief Bullitt.

D.U. (Diagnosis undetermined.) Discomfort in lumbar area.

Medication: aspirin.

"Next!" Chief Bullitt would call.

"I haven't gone in three days, Doctor."

"Remove your hat, boy," Chief Bullitt said. "And stand at attention when you speak."

The man entered, nervously, and was examined, his shirt pulled out, his abdomen cautiously explored by the fingers of Doctor Claremont. "Any pain here?. . Here?. . Here?"

Diagnosis: constipation.

Medication: one ounce of mineral oil with 5 cc. of cascara.

When it was apparent that nothing serious would be reported. Doctor Claremont would leave, with relief, to be called when needed.

It was not often that the crew complained of anything more serious than backache or constipation or athlete's foot. There were mornings when the whole sick bay was crowded with lonely boys from the prairies, all with athlete's foot, sitting around on overturned pails with their feet soaking in other pails of potassium-permanganate solution, and with thermometers in their mouths. "Keeps the yardbirds quiet," Bullitt would say.

The men had learned not to complain of anything serious. If they came in speaking of fever, or dizziness, or any other than generalized discomfort, Chief Bullitt, in Doctor Claremont's absence, would spring into action. "How awful!" he would say. "Mercy, lie down on the deck! How did you make it this far? Oh, my, what a hero!"

The muffled, involuntary hysteria this set off among the thermometers and pails would send the young victim running, to nurse his grievance, and his hatred for Bullitt, alone. "Homesick," Bullitt would say. "Sympathy would only make it worse."

And when they had all gone, the real pleasure of the day began for Chief Bullitt, behind the closed door. There was the daily form to be made out, the beautiful official report, on which all the ills that flesh is heir to were set down with a number which corresponded to a diagnosis in the Diagnostic Nomenclature of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Every complaint, no matter how nebulous, had to be fitted in somehow. And when the form was complete, neat and shipshape, Williams was sent off with it for Doctor Claremont's signature. Doctor Claremont, brooding alone in the wardroom, would examine the report in silence. He rarely spoke to Williams during this daily exchange. He was courteous and non-military, but completely indifferent to Williams as a person, as he was to everyone else about him.

Afterward,' Williams would take the signed form to Captain Thompson's cabin. The captain had it on his desk then, the relentless statement of the crew's condition. Did a man say he felt too ill to stand watch? Look for his name on the list. It would be there if he had been able to produce a temperature of one hundred or more. Ninety-nine point five would not do. Let him be silent and stand watch until next sick call, at noon, or at eight in the evening.

"After more than nineteen years in the Navy," Bullitt said to Williams, "just when I'm about ready to go home covered with glory, what happens? They give me a war, and they give me you to work with! If we had a soda fountain on board you might be of some use turning out banana splits. But in the sick bay! Get your book down," he would say. "Break out the scales. It may kill you, or it may kill me, but I'll teach you what I can."

Rule: Normal blood clots in three to five minutes. Arterial blood is bright red; venous, dark.

"And if a shell hits the deck, and a man lies there torn apart, what will you do, swoon? Or have the vapors?"

Rule: Do not cease artificial respiration for at least two hours.

"Would you believe it, sometimes we get so far out to sea we can't even call an ambulance!"

Shortly before lunch Chief Bullitt would leave the sick bay to go back to the chief's quarters, worn out, as he said, by the effort of trying to pull Williams up by his bootstraps. Williams would be relieved to see him go, but he told himself, as he had told himself over and over again in the Navy, that the issues at stake were too large to allow for any personal feelings. Someday, God willing, the war would be over, and if he was alive he would go home again. Meanwhile he must try hard to do his chosen job in the best way he could.

When he was quite certain that Bullitt had gone, Williams would open the top half of the sick-bay door to the more cheerful world outside. On the deck the work went ahead loudly and with good humor. The sun shone. The smell of good, strong coffee filled the ship, coming from open hatches which led to the engine rooms below, coming from the gun mounts, and even from the boatswain's locker. And the ship moved forward through the sea, sighing, rising and falling gently from side to side with a kind of ancient majesty, as if it had a soul and a character and instincts of its own.

A pharmacist's mate is a sailor to his shipmates only by courtesy. He is not required to know anything about knots or lines or navigation; he does not have to swab decks or chip paint. In time of war he is not even required to stand watch. These regulations set Williams apart from the others whether he liked it or not. In the Navy hospitals and dispensaries where he had been on duty before, he had not felt set apart: he had swabbed latrines and carried bedpans along with everyone else. But it was a very different thing now to be a lone pharmacist's mate among sailors on a destroyer.

The ship's company of the Ajax had been salted by the Bureau of Personnel with old hands. About one third of the crew were men who had survived Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal or the lava Sea; men like Radioman Kerensky, Boatswain's Mate McNulty, Chief Wins-low, Lieutenant Palazzo. Many of them were even legally men, having successfully passed the age of twenty-one; Boats McNulty himself was all of twenty-three. These were magnificent figures indeed, men of expansive humor and appetites, capable of great, warm condescension for younger men of their own sort who had come into the Navy as they had, on the deck. Tyler Williams was so unsuccessful a sailor that he could not even think of the Ajax as "she." To him the Ajax was a boat, and he was a working passenger, tolerated, without proprietary rights. But from the open door of the sick bay, as the ship sailed on toward the Bay of Argentia, off Newfoundland, to the first practice rendezvous in its shakedown cruise, he watched with growing curiosity and wonder the relationships of the other men.

Every old hand on the Ajax had his "boy." It was a satisfying relationship to the man and to the boy — the sort of relationship men fall into when their lives are lived apart from women. It must not be assumed that there was anything unnatural in it. It was merely a normal expression of the need of all men for love of one another. Strong men have a need to love, protect and guide someone younger or more vulnerable than themselves, just as younger men need a guide and a model for their behavior. Simple, uncomplicated men found it much easier to give and receive this rough affection than did less spontaneous men, such as Tyler Williams.

Even Captain Thompson had his boy, a young towheaded seaman named Stewart Brown. At eighteen Brown was so clean, so healthy, so vital that sometimes in the early morning it was rather difficult for any older man to look at him.

Captain Thompson was essentially an uncomplicated man. He was a powerfully built, sturdy man, who had been the best boxer in his class at Annapolis. He had a pretty young wife ashore; her smiling picture stood in his cabin above his desk. He had two small daughters but no son. The members of the crew watched silently and with some concern when at sea his affection turned toward Brown.

It was Brown who stood messenger watch when the captain was on the bridge. In idle moments they talked together, the captain passing on to Brown the lore of the sea which is best passed on in this way. It was a satisfaction to see the look of quiet and amused affection that lighted the captain's eyes when Brown was on hand.

But the crew feared that Brown did not appreciate the subtleties of the relationship. In his pride at having been singled out, he might go too far to demonstrate his privilege, and, while the captain was amused by his impertinence and by the casual way he sometimes addressed him, he would be amused only to a certain point. The crew wanted Brown to rise to the captain's regard and appreciate its value. They could not and would not spell it out for him, but, if he failed, the whole ship would be poorer for his failure.

In the meantime, in those early days in 1942, Williams watched other, more successful relationships being established.

The strongest man of the crew was Boatswain's Mate First Class James McNulty. He had been born in city slums; he grew up in the gutter, a good street fighter, a rebel. But hke all men he longed for order and purpose in his life, and when he found it in the Navy his devotion to that life was complete.

Although he was only twenty-three years old, McNulty had been in the Navy almost six years. He was absolutely immaculate in his personal habits. His fitted dungarees were tailored for him in a shop in Norfolk, and, like his blue work shirts, they had been faded by salt spray and softened by repeated washing to a texture and shade that was the envy of every man. His fair skin was burned by the sun to the color of a good Burgundy wine, and his fair, close-cropped hair looked like the clipped, frayed ends of salt-bleached twine. His hats, scrubbed with a stiff brush, and soaked in brine for whiteness, rode the side of his head like a challenge, and no man had ever seen the wind carry one away.

McNulty rarely smiled, and seldom raised his voice. He did not need to. He was never out of the range of worshiping young eyes. The merest turn of his head would bring two or three seamen to his side, but if it was anything in particular he wanted done he would look over the heads of the others for "Stud" Clancy. "Where's my boy?" he would say. "Where's my boy, Clancy?"

And, "Yes, Boats," Clancy would say breathlessly, coming on the double. "I'm here, Boats. What can I do for you. Boats?"

From the tone of Clancy's voice, and the open look in his clear, boy's eyes, it was obvious that he wanted to be asked to do something really worthy, such as scrub the deck with a hand brush, or paint the whole ship, singlehanded, before sundown, just to demonstrate to every man on board that he, Stud Clancy, was good enough to be McNulty's boy.

When the Ajax had left Norfolk, after the commissioning, McNulty could be found in the afternoon at the boatswain's locker, or at the forward hold, or, in fine weather, out on the open forecastle, with his boys in a circle about him, while they earnestly tried, with solemn faces and stubborn fingers, to tie a Turk's-head knot, or to make a lanyard like the one McNulty wore around his neck. On this lanyard McNulty proudly wore his badge of office, his boatswain's pipe, which he had touched here and there with lead, and molded with his fingers until it produced for him his own sweet, sad note, his own personal cry of discipline, defiance and joy in the face of life. And here McNulty counseled his boys, answering their questions gravely, so that no boy was ashamed to ask any question of him.

Walking on the deck, Williams would see this group in the sun, and his steps would lag a little, almost against his will. Sometimes McNulty would look up with one of his rare smiles, and say, "Come on, sit down. Even a pill pusher ought to know how to tie a few knots."

Half angry, half amused, Williams would smile and pass on, saying he had work to do. Damn it all, he was too old to be McNulty's boy!

CHAPTER 2

LIFE ABOARD the Ajax required adaptability, a love of discipline for its own sake, and an instinctive sense of the inevitable, so that a man would find nothing strange, for example, in being required to sleep in a bunk directly below a length of steam pipe, as Williams had to do. A man suited to that world knew where he belonged, but Tyler Williams couldn't find his place; he kept bumping his head on the steam pipe.

Still, he kept his days full. He worked hard. Although Bullitt never acknowledged his industry with even a hint of approval, he was scornful if Williams was too solicitous about the welfare of the men. When Billy Becker, the yeoman striker, Sullivan's boy, was taken off the watch list because he had a severe cold with a temperature of one hundred and three, Williams took him a bowl of soup. A strong wind was blowing off Cape Sable, and Williams lost the first bowl of soup he started out with. The wind lifted it right out of the bowl; he saw the mass of it suspended for an instant in the air before it was flung over the side. He went back to refill the bow'l, and this time he put a heavy crockery plate on top. Bullitt met Williams when he came back with the tray. "They have finger bowls in the officers' galley," he said. "Why don't you take him one after the soup?"

Chief Radioman Benson heard the remark in passing. "Boy," he said, shaking his head, "there's a guy who is really asking for it."

It was true that Bullitt was not very popular in the chiefs' quarters. Only Benson and Chief Boatswain's Mate Kronsky had, like himself, worked themselves up from the lowest rating. Winslow, the chief quartermaster, Calder, the chief machinist's mate, and Tomkins, the supply chief, were civilians who had been given the rating of chief petty officer because of their peacetime background and experience. Presumably, this division should have created a balance, without friction, but Bullitt had thrown it off. Benson was young for a chief in the regular Navy, and it was a sensitive point with him. Bullitt enjoved baiting Benson, who, in return, hated Bulhtt.

Kronsky, like many another old boatswain, had a vague dislike for members of the Hospital Corps, regarding nursing and hospital administration as the province of women. However, he generally put up with the men who did this work. But Kronsky had become fond of Chief Winslow, the quartermaster, who had come to the Navy from the Merchant Marine. When Bullitt had sneered at the Merchant Marine as unmilitary and unheroic, he had alienated Kronsky.

That left Tomkins and Calder, and for them Bullitt reserved his special contempt. Tomkins, the young supply chief, had worked in the catering department of a large hotel. He did an excellent job; if the Ajax was a "happy" ship, as indeed it was, a not inconsiderable factor involved was the quality of the food served. Calder, the chief machinist, had had some practical engineering training, and the Navy had sent him to damage-control school. He was an extremely important member of the crew of the Ajax.

Both Tomkins and Calder were fair, confident young men, who laughed a great deal. I hey were the sort of men who grow up in the suburbs of our large cities, and go to good high schools; excellent examples of middle-class America. No one knew what Bullitt's background had been, but after nineteen years in the Navy he had become so indoctrinated in the stratification of Navy life, where a man is either an officer or an enlisted man, an aristocrat or a commoner, that he could find no ground on which to meet Tomkins or Calder. Their open, happy, untroubled faces irritated him. Their easy, relaxed way with officers made him angry and jealous. He baited them with questions, trapped them by their ignorance of Navy ways, and then laughed sardonically at their confusion and anger. "Oh, so it's 'dinner,' is it?" he would say, when Tomkins was discussing the day's menu with Butler, the cook. Or, to Chief Calder, "Did you say 'pick that up off the^oor'?" He shook his head. "You civilians may win the war," he said. "But it will take years for the Navy to recover."

The Ajax arrived at Argentia during the time of the midnight sun, when, day or night, it was never wholly light nor wholly dark. With a sister fleet of destroyers, they rode anchor in the harbor, in an endless world of gray water, off a bleak, gray shore. Suddenly it was impossible to imagine that anything else existed, as if they had managed to sail off the edge of an ancient map into the unknown world.

On the morning of the first day, a liberty list was posted and Williams saw his name there. In the late afternoon, when Bullitt had finally left him alone, he closed the door of the sick bay, got out his shaving gear, and propped a small hand mirror above the sink. In the glass even his own lean, intelligent, not unpleasant face seemed unfamiliar to him. His past life, his study, his teaching, all seemed part of life in another incarnation. The Navy had run over him with its machinery until everything else was flattened out of him, as if its indifference to and ignorance of the values by which he had lived had suddenly rendered those values meaningless. Perhaps here lay the distinction that separated the civilian from the military man. A man who would choose a military life for a career was a man who welcomed or needed in some way the security of a narrow berth in a world of arbitrary limitations. He, Williams, was not such a man. And here he was now, trapped in a world which could not possibly be more alien to him, in which he was alone because he could not identify himself with any of its loyalties. He felt a sense of depression, loneliness and detachment. Even the conviction that had brought him to war seemed momentarily shaken.

Wearing clean undress whites, he went ashore with the liberty party. In the unchanging gray light, scrub-pine growth struggled up low hills, which seemed not hills so much as piles of glacial moraine. The Navy buildings lay beyond the port community itself, whose few structures, in this land beyond the timber line, looked as if they had been built of orange crates and bits of driftwood.

Williams walked heavily over the stony ground to the recreation building, a large Quonset hut, where beer was to be had. At the long, crowded bar his ration of six cans was given to him all at once, all opened at the same time, and Williams scooped them up gratefully in his arms and made his way to an unoccupied table in a far corner. He sat sideways, with his feet up on the bench, and quietly, in a businesslike way, he began to drink the six cans of beer.

After the third or fourth can he began to hold a conversation with himself. It had been so long since he had spoken outside of the performance of his duty ("Where does it hurt?" "Does it itch between the toes of the other foot, too?") that he had almost forgotten the conversational tone of his voice. He was a fool, he told himself pleasantly, his voice softened and relaxed by the beer, unheard in the general din which filled the echoing, barnlike hall. Any idiot could do better than he was doing. He was almost twenty-six years old, and he had passed other hazards in his life. Couldn't he just mark time, and do his duty, and wait until this damned war was over, without working himself up like a second-string Hamlet?

Well, maybe six cans of beer wouldn't do it. He went back to the bar and scooped up six more, paying no heed to the harried boy behind the bar who wanted to know if he hadn't been there before. Then he went back to his corner bench again and stretched out full length, holding the fresh beer carefully to his mouth. He had read too much, he decided. He had spent too much of his life in libraries. He was a sort of semi-animated encyclopedia who knew Greek verbs and the minor poets of the Restoration, but aside from that — why, hell, boy, he said to himself, you couldn't be relied on to give the right time of day.

At this point the arched ceiling above him began to waver in a curious, sickening way, and he sat up abruptly. He stood up, and unsteadily made his way toward the door.

When he awoke the next morning he sat on the edge of his bunk and tried to hold his head together with his two hands until he could see clearly. It was very early; reveille had not yet sounded. But he was fully, painfully awake, his heart thumping, every nerve on edge.

In a moment he struggled into his clothes, went topside and made his way to the sick bay. There he closed the door behind him and got the jar of powdered coffee down from the shelf, boiled water in a medical beaker, and made himself a cup of coffee. While he was holding the steaming mug to his face with trembling hands, the top half of the sick-bay door was suddenly thrown open, and framed there in the opening was the ruddy, smiling face of Boats McNulty.

"Did you ever tie one on, Doc!" McNulty said.

A flush of color crept into Williams' face and he felt a surprising, involuntary sense of pleasure. No one on the Ajax had ever called him "Doc" before. A medical officer was "Doctor," but "Doc" was the traditional name for a pharmacist's mate, just as "Boats" was for the boatswain's mate, and "Chips" for the ship's carpenter. But no one had called him that before.

McNulty opened the lower half of the door and came into the sick bay. He took another mug from the shelf above the sink and made himself a cup of coffee. His presence changed the whole sick bay. It was suddenly a part of the ship, as the boatswain's locker was a part of the ship, or a gun mount, or the forward hold.

"Ensign Cripps was on the gangway," McNulty said. "He wanted to put you on report, but I talked him out of it. I said we had to handle pill pushers like you with kid gloves during wartime because you could lower the boom on any of us."

"What did I do.'" Williams asked. " "Well," McNulty said with relish, "Clancy and I managed to get you over the side all right, but then you got away from us. You went below and kept punching guys awake to tell them you were going to beat the hell out of them."

"Oh, no," Williams said.

"Kerensky finally slapped you down. You know, friendly-like."

"Oh, no," Williams said again, feeling his jaw.

"Seriously, Doc," McNulty said, "I don't think you could punch your way out of a paper bag, but you sure gave us a lot of fun. That left of yours, Doc," he said, shaking his head sadly. "It would draw flies."

"What happened then?" Williams asked.

"Oh, Kerensky and I carried you to your sack. We undressed you and tossed you in. You smelled like a stinking brewery. Did you leave any beer for anybody else?"

"I don't think so," Williams said.

"We didn't know you had it in you. Doc," McNulty said, with awkward joviality. "We had you down as a kind of one-way guy."

Williams could say nothing. He turned aside, to make himself another mug of coffee.

"It sure made us feel better," McNulty went on. "We sure thought we'd pulled down a bunch of sad sacks in the sick bay, with Claremont and Bullitt and you."

Williams busied himself with making his coffee, his back to McNulty, feeling again that quick sense of pleasure. He had needed to establish some sort of relationship with the men around him. Suddenly McNulty's approval seemed the most important thing in the world. Maybe when his head stopped coming apart at the seams he would know how to acknowledge that.

"What did you do on the beach, Doc?" McNulty asked, in a hearty tone, as if anxious to get the conversation back on safe ground.

"Oh, I was teaching," Williams said automatically, turning back to face him, "and working for my doctor's degree."

McNulty, who had been lighting a match, held it suspended in mid-air. "You mean they wouldn't let you finish up to be a doctor?" he said in amazement. "You mean they just threw a rating at you?" He lighted his cigarette and leaned toward Williams confidentially, his voice filled with that easy compassion and warmth for the underdog, the timid and exploited, which he possessed in such magnitude. "Let me give the skipper the word. Doc," he said. "You ought to be able to pull down better duty than this if you were studying to be a doctor."

Williams laughed, in spite of himself, an act which threatened to unhinge his skull at the temples. "Not a doctor of medicine," he explained. "Medicine isn't my field."

McNulty's expression changed. His eyes narrowed with speculation. Maybe he had quit school after the eighth grade, but nobody laughed at McNulty. "What was your line. Doc?" he asked quietly.

Williams looked at him, at his firm, healthy face, his untroubled eyes, now rather guarded. Some fortunate instinct told him quickly that McNulty would never in this world understand about Spenser and The Faerie Queene, and he chose the lesser of his two interests. "Anthropology," he said.

"Well, whatever it is," McNulty said, "don't Navy men get it?"

"Anthropology is the study of man," Williams said, wishing he had kept his mouth shut. "You take an isolated unit of people — a tribe in the jungle, a remote Indian village — and you study everything about them. Their relationships. Their religion. Their sex habits. Actually," Williams went on, his confused, postdrunken thoughts suddenly taking off on a wild flight of fancy, "this ship would make an excellent field of study for an anthropologist."

"Are you kidding me, Doc?" McNulty said in a level but friendly way. "I don't think these guys have any religion, and if I find any guy with sex habits I'll sure as hell turn him in."

"Patterns of behavior," Williams said, sounding more pedantic than he ever did in the classroom. "Perhaps I should have said patterns of behavior, instead of habits."

McNulty's forehead wrinkled and he began to look a little bored. "Of course, I'm not educated like you," he said. "I never had much chance for school. But it all sounds like a crock to me. Doc."

"Actually," Williams said miserably, with the hopeless feeling that this episode, which had begun so well, was turning out all wrong, "actually, maybe it isn't very interesting after all, now that I come to think of it."

"Well," McNulty said comfortably, in a consoling tone, "it must help you to know so much."

At this moment Chief Bullitt appeared in the doorway, elegant and scornful. "Really," he said, his eyebrows going up, "is this a private party? Or may I join your?"

"Good morning, Chief," Williams said quickly, beginning to gather up the mugs and the coffee and the beaker.

McNulty yawned, stretching his arms slowly over his head until the tendons cracked. He looked at Bullitt silently, not bothering to conceal the dislike in his eyes. "You've got a good boy here. Chief," he said, lowering his arms, and thumping Williams on the back. "You're a lucky guy to have old Doc here."

Bullitt sat down in the aluminum chair like a potentate assuming his throne of state. He turned his brown, ugly face up to McNulty with an air of calculated insolence. "Sick call is at eight o'clock," he said.

McNulty slowly stepped out into the passageway and stood there, looking back at Bullitt.

"Oh, and by the way, Boatswain's Mate First Class McNulty," Bullitt said, "I do not intend to have to ask you again to arrange the rigging on a Stokes stretcher, so that it can be lowered over the side. And I don't suppose you've made the restraining jacket, either. I don't know which one will be more important to your men. Those who don't hurt themselves will probably just go nuts, anyway."

McNulty's eyes were flat and cold and hard. "I will do all of it in my own damn good time," he said. He turned his head almost imperceptibly, and spat with unerring aim and force over the rail.

Although it was some little time before he knew it, Williams, sponsored by McNulty, was now acknowledged to be the new confederate of all-right men aboard the Ajax. There was someone in the sick bay whom they felt they understood, after all, fundamentally alien though he was to them. When the chips were down they would expect to be able to count on Williams.

In the Navy, it is up to the key men of the enlisted ranks to protect the interests of the crew. It was fairly easy to jettison enlisted men of lower ratings who did not fit into the scheme of things, or who threatened the harmony of a ship's operation. The leading petty officers; Sullivan, the yeoman; McNulty; even Williams, if he cooperated, could break a man if they wanted to. By shifting him from department to department, by assigning him the most unpleasant duties, by pretending, in his presence, that he did not exist, they could make him wish he had never been born. In the end, they would force him to put in a request for a transfer. Sullivan usually had these requests typed and waiting.

But with a chief it was different. You were supposed to be able to rely on his cooperation and instinctive understanding. If it was made known to a chief that he was unpopular or disliked, the unwritten code said that he must find some excuse to request a transfer. Obviously, Bullitt was not going to do this. He could not help knowing that he was disliked, but either he was the sort of man who enjoyed the goad of unpopularity or he had reasons of his own for wishing to stay where he was. In any event, steps had to be taken.

In their defense, it must be said that it was for more than the reason of simple dislike that men like McNulty wished to be rid of him. With the Ajax completing at Argentia the first phase of its practice maneuvers, the air was filled with rumors. They were to go to the Mediterranean. They were to join the Atlantic Patrol. They were to go south, through the Panama Canal, to the Pacific.

From the time of its commissioning at Norfolk, through its stay at Argentia, the Ajax had been gradually fitted with the very newest developments in radar and sonar, the latest in projectile equipment for K-guns. Also, the Ajax had been constructed to sustain a high speed for very long periods.

The effect of all this was to instill in every man the conviction that they were a marked lot, destined for some important mission. Since the Bureau of Personnel would scarcely exercise less care in the selection of the crew than the Bureau of Ships had demonstrated in the construction of the Ajax, certainly some effort must have been made to see that they were a hand-picked lot. The Bureau would want all of them to work together, and to get along well together, and if some mistake had been made in assignment, obviously the Bureau would be grateful to them for attempting to rectify it. By this specious reasoning they arrived at the inescapable conclusion that, for the sake of the Ajax, Chief Bullitt must go.

It was shortly after the drunken episode that Doctor Claremont came to the sick bay one afternoon, when Williams was alone. "You spend more time with Chief Bullitt than I do, Williams," the doctor said, clasping and unclasping his thin hands. "Does he seem — well, strange, or unbalanced to you?"

Williams looked up from his task of folding gauze squares with surprise. "I suppose I never thought about it, sir. Why?"

Doctor Claremont paced the few feet of the sick bay, back and forth. "Sullivan came to me in my cabin," he said. "He told me that the chiefs had sent him. They say his behavior is — well, odd. I gather they feel he should be sent ashore for study when we get back to a port in the States."

Williams' immediate reaction was one of resistance. This was the old, familiar device. If you couldn't get rid of a man any other way, you could always claim that he was psycho. Williams returned Doctor Claremont's questioning glance without speaking. It was not necessary for him to speak. They had both served in Navy hospitals. They knew what could happen to a man who was sent there with a Diagnosis undetermined. Neuropsychiatric.

"They say he drinks in his quarters, too," Doctor Claremont said, reflectively. "I suppose that might account for something."

"I wouldn't know about that, sir," Williams said, going on with his work. It was true that Bullitt did not allow him to use medical alcohol in the sick bay for any purpose for which something else, such as iodine, might be substituted. Williams had been instructed in his hospital training to clean the skin, before a routine injection, with a bit of cotton saturated in alcohol; but iodine or Merthiolate was used aboard the Ajax, while the supply of medical alcohol steadily and mysteriously diminished. But Williams did not allow himself to have any opinion about this at all. To begin with, it seemed to him far less harmful to drink medical alcohol than shaving lotion, as some of the men did, or the propellent fuel of the torpedoes, after straining it through a loaf of bread, under the impression that this rendered it fit for human consumption. Also, as was repeatedly pointed out to him. Chief Bullitt was a Regular Navy man, and, while a cat may look at a queen, it is better that a member of the Naval Reserve see nothing in the presence of a member of the USN, And besides — Williams looked around him at the tidy sick bay, at the results of all the careful, steady effort that had filled their time. Even now Bullitt was not lolling about the chiefs' quarters, drinking coffee or reading a comic book, as some of the others did in the afternoons. No, he was down below in the hold, unpacking and checking medical equipment.

"He does ride me, Doctor," Williams said at length. "He is difficult. But I'm not prepared to say that he is psychotic."

Doctor Claremont sighed, and dropped his hands, "I suppose we can just ignore the whole thing," he said, turning to leave the sick bay. "It will probably all blow over."

It was not until practice maneuvers were completed and the AJax was under way again, on the first day out, that McNulty came to Williams. Apparently, since Sullivan had heard nothing from Doctor Claremont, the conspirators had decided to take a new tack. McNultv came to Williams with a confidential air, and an easy camaraderie that was shattered by his astonishment at meeting with resistance. "But Doc!" he said. "I've seen how he treats you! You can't tell me you wouldn't like to get rid of him. All you have to do," he said, lowering his voice to a tone of earnest persuasion, his eyes fixed on Williams, "is to say that you think he's just a little off, a little Asiatic. You know, just something to get him off the ship long enough so that we can go off without him."

"But not that way," Williams said stubbornly. His job that afternoon was to fill gelatin capsules with a compound of acetylsalicylic. He wore a laboratory apron to do this, and, with the compound and the capsules spread out before him, he felt like a travesty of a housewife making tea cakes. "I don't see why they have to crucify Bullitt just because they happen not to like him," he said, doggedly going about his work.

McNulty pushed his hat back on his head with an air of bafflement. "But it's more than that. Doc," he said, his voice rising again. "We're at war, Doc! We're all on this ship together! A guy like that is a jinx. He could foul us all up. Don't you see that?"

"No, I don't," Williams said. "And even if I did want to get rid of him, I couldn't do it by casting doubt on his sanity. Anyway, he does his job well. How could he foul us up?"

McNulty lighted a cigarette. He took his hat off and ran his calloused hand over his short, frayed hair.

"I don't know, Doc," he said. "It's hard to tell you. I've watched him with the others. He just doesn't really give a damn, Doc, about anything or anybody, except himself."

"But that doesn't mean he's insane," Williams said.

McNulty pulled at his ear. "He is a little Asiatic, Doc," he said, using again that familiar Navy term to describe what long periods of duty and physical excess in the Orient can do to a man. "You wouldn't have to say anything definite. Doc," he went on, with both pleading and exasperation in his voice. "I believe we're headed for Boston, and if Bullitt went ashore there to the hospital for an examination, say, why we'd probably pull out before he could get back to the ship."

"You've never seen a psychiatric ward, have you?" Williams asked.

"No, Doc," McNulty said.

And how could Williams describe that to anyone who had never seen it? Psychiatry in the hands of inadequately trained hospital personnel could become a one-way road to destruction. He would never forget the lock wards in the hospital where he had served, with the long row of beds, where the patients could read their own diagnoses, printed on cards clipped to the footboards of the beds, words such as "moron" and "paranoia" and "schizophrenia." Oh, the long, gray, ill-smelling wards, where too often the diagnosis undetermined became the diagnosis determined.

Williams took a tray of filled capsules and shook them, to free them of the dust of the compound. He put down the tray and turned to face McNulty. "I can't do it, Boats," he said. "I just can't do it."

McNulty grasped his arm. "I'm not very good at words. Doc," he said, "but what I'm trying to tell you is that we've just got to get this man off the ship. And if he won't do it himself, we've got to find some way to do it for him."

"But I don't think personalities should enter into this at all," Williams said. "What else matters as long as he does his job?"

Both their faces were solemn, set in expressions of stubborn determination. But not antagonism. They were like two men trying to convey an important idea to each other in a second language, not possessing a common language in which they could surely make themselves understood.

"In war. Doc," McNulty said, dropping his voice to a quiet but emphatic tone, "in war you got to be able to count on every man as if he was a part of you. You can't think in action. There's no time. The man beside you has got to be just like your own arm. If you had to stop to wonder what he was going to do. Doc, you'd be dead!"

"But wouldn't Bullitt know what to do?" Williams asked. "He's been in the Navy for nineteen years!"

McNulty dropped Williams' arm and turned away. Williams went back to his capsules, and they were both silent for a moment.

Finally McNulty spoke. "I just can't seem to make you see it. Doc," he said. "It's something he hasn't got, Doc. I don't know how else to explain it. It's just something he hasn't got."

Again they were both silent, and again it was McNulty who finally spoke. But this time his tone was different, with a half-bantering attempt at lightness. "I think I like you, Doc," he said, "even if you are so damned one-way. I'll try to make you see this, before we leave Boston. Because Boston is our last chance, Doc. We got to get rid of Bullitt. I got to make you see it my way." He shook his head, and tried again. "There isn't anybody on board to give him the word, for one thing," he said. "Claremont's too young, and he isn't really Navy, anyway. And the skipper isn't a medical man. Some guys just get out of hand when there isn't anybody over them tough enough to give them the word."

Chapter 3

IN Boston, however, there were many occupations for the men of the Ajax other than the plot to rid the ship of Chief Bullitt. There was the requisitioning and the loading of supplies, there was paint to be chipped and paint to be applied, to repair the weathering effects of salt water, and there was every man's duty — to see that the girls ashore knew that the Ajax was in port. It was a program which kept everyone busy day and night.

The average age of the crew members of the Ajax was somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one. When Billy Becker celebrated his twenty-first birthday on board there was a general feeling of satisfaction and achievement shared by all, in an atmosphere of much hilarity and manly humor. "Mother, there's a man in the house!" his friends called, assuming falsetto voices, when Billy appeared with his tray at lunch. Billy himself celebrated the happy day by smoking a cigar on the fantail after chow, regarding the lengthening ash with quiet and solemn pride.

No embarrassment marred this occasion as it did on the nineteenth birthday of young Stanley, of the engine-room or black gang, whose unfortunate mother made the mistake of sending him a cake in care of the Red Cross. It was carried aboard at Norfolk by an aggressively pretty member of the Junior League, wearing her Red Cross volunteer uniform. This admirable young woman knew exactly how to deal with enlisted men. She talked to them more loudly than to her friends, enunciating very clearly, and she smiled constantly, never relaxing either process for a single moment. In the sacrosanct crew's quarters, where, in the old days, the presence of a woman would have been considered an omen of doom, she ceremoniously opened the box, revealing the cake with its pink frosting and the separate packages of birthday candles. After she had blessedly gone, Stanley's friends helped him out as well as they could. "Scotty" MacDougal hacked the cake up with his sheath knife, and they stood around in a circle and shoved the hunks into their mouths in gloomy silence. When captain's boy Stewart Brown began to sing "Happy Birthday to You," in a high-pitched, mincing voice, Stud Clancy told him to knock it off, in no uncertain terms. After the cake was eaten, Stanley went back to the engine room and got himself thoroughly covered with grease.

Somebody ought to have given Stanley's mother the word. In every man's thoughts his mother was often present, and in liberty ports she was remembered with gifts of green or pink embroidered silk pillow covers, but the general feeling was that she ought to sever that silver cord, or at least to step out of the foreground long enough for a guy to pick out a girl.

Although the crew of the Ajax went ashore on liberty two by two, the institution of old hand and boy stopped at the gangway. On liberty a man instinctively sought the company of one whose experience paralleled his own. The older, sophisticated men, men way past twenty, such as McNulty, Sullivan and Kerensky, went ashore with quite definite ideas in mind, but the young boys went ashore breathless with excitement, with no plans in mind, but prepared for anything.

These younger men could wander the ancient streets of Boston, as other good patriots in the service of their country had done before them. They could go to the Old Howard and see the famous Tassel Dancer, a marvel of beauty and muscle control, who not only kept five tassels, attached to various strategic parts of her anatomy, spinning simultaneously, but also climaxed her act by waving an American flag at the same time. They could prowl the Common, making catcalls in the dark, or crying the Rebel yell, just from an excess of good spirits. In the back rows of movie houses, they could pet with the bold little victory girls, spawned by the war, who traveled, like the sailors, in pairs; and then, after the varied excesses of the night, they could restore their tissues with a hamburger and a glass of milk at a white-tiled lunch counter, glaringly bright, echoing, echoing with the music of the juke box.

But such men as McNulty and Radioman Kerensky wasted no time on victory girls. McNulty and Kerensky forayed forth in search of wickedness. After their years in the Navy, they knew the special bar or inn in any port town, and they hit that place like homing pigeons, happy and expansive in its familiar atmosphere.

In Boston, in Scollay Square, the Hotel Regal waited for them, a wonderful, self-contained haven, where a man could disappear for a seventy-two-hour liberty and never see the light of day until he dragged back to the ship like a beat-up tomcat. In the Hotel Regal any woman whose charms brought a man back more than once was referred to as his "old lady."

"Meet my old lady," McNulty said, in one of the crowded social rooms on the first floor of the Hotel Regal. And, "How do you do, Mrs. McNulty?" Tyler Williams said, incorrigibly civilian, thereby casting a pall of embarrassment over the happy group. But the awkwardness was resolved when Kerensky hit a passing French sailor and laid him out cold on the floor, the blood from his nose matching the scarlet pompon on his hat.

"Now why did you do that?" McNulty asked, in the sorrowful tone of patient exasperation one uses with an old friend who is sometimes rather difficult, as the French sailor was removed by the hospital corpsmen assigned to the Navy ambulance standing by outside.

"He looked at my woman," Kerensky said, glaring fiercely at the painted little mask beside him.

It was at places like the Hotel Regal that the men were separated from the boys. If the boys were intrepid enough to enter, they were permitted at the front bar, and occasionally, but only occasionally, they were invited to join the men at a table with their women. But they dared not stay there too long, not until they had learned how to manage a woman.

Mornings in Boston were hideous. When the crew divisions mustered at eight o'clock on the deck in the sharp breeze that blew across the fish pier, their bilious faces turned to shades of deeper green. But after an hour or so, after coffee and a little brisk work in the open air, the crew would begin to revive, the color return to cheeks, the eyes brighten, the steps lighten, the voices rise, and by late afternoon, as liberty time approached, every man would be ready to do it all over again.

Williams suffered mornings along with the rest, his discomfort only partially alleviated by McNulty's Cure. He had retreated to the sick bay one morning to make himself some coffee after a night of doing the rounds ashore. He was angry and disgusted with himself as he looked at his gray, tired face in the mirror over the sink. McNulty found him there, and, after taking one look at Williams' shaking hands and sweat-beaded brow, he closed the door and locked it. "Now," he said, "you take two aspirin and a benzedrine, and you wash it down with a jigger of spirits of ammonia. A pill pusher at Pearl taught me that, and it's best to lie down on the deck when you take it," he added, "or at least stand clear of the bulkhead, so you won't shake the sick bay to pieces."

Williams didn't know what Bullitt did on his liberties. The chief went ashore alone every evening, and presumably he came back late, and presumably he was drunk, but the demands of his tradition forbade him to show any of the effects of excess. After morning sick call he would begin again on his expressed program of making the Ajax the best-equipped ship in the squadron. He would have his requisition form complete, carefully made out the day before, tirelessly and stubbornly repeating on it the items which, because of short supply, he had not been given the day before. Williams would be sent with this to Doctor Claremont's cabin, for his approval and signature, and then the two of them, Bullitt and Williams, would set out to do battle again at the medical-stores warehouse.

Prior to its commissioning, of course, the Ajax had been fitted out with medical supplies and equipment according to the orders of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. It was customary procedure to replace medicines and supplies used in the normal course of events by submitting requisition order forms to supply depots. Here the officer in charge might delete items or cut the amount, according to what he thought the Ajax required. But since Chief Bullitt was not content to have his ship merely adequately equipped, he waged a constant warfare with the officers of supply depots.

Doctor Claremont, aside from signing the requisitions, took no part in this activity, content to leave it to Bullitt. In Boston Claremont seemed even more withdrawn and removed from his surroundings. His wife was unable to join him there; she was too far advanced in pregnancy to attempt the trip. His own request for leave, like all other requests submitted, had not been granted. The Ajax was on stand-by orders. She had to be ready to shove off on a few hours' notice if necessary.

The medical-treatment and first-aid stations of any Navy ship are an extremely complicated system, designed for the best and most immediate treatment at any part of the ship during action. The sick bay was only the central base, the nerve center of this system. During action it would not even be used as a place of treatment. For this purpose the officers' wardroom, a larger space, would serve. The long dining table there had been designed for use also as an operating table. A standard hospital operating light had been installed overhead, and the wardroom had its own separate electric generator and tank of fresh water. Along the bulkheads there were large medical-supply cabinets, and it was these cabinets, as well as the many smaller ones everywhere aboard ship, that Bullitt was fighting to supply.

Every major compartment below deck and every gun mount above deck had its own first-aid cabinet. In addition, the captain's gig and the whaleboat each held its own supply of first-aid equipment, in the event of the abandonment of ship, and every life raft was similarly equipped; in action. Doctor Claremont, Chief Bullitt and Williams would carry large shoulder cases filled with emergency supplies.

It was Bullitt's ambition to create an independent treatment unit at every possible first-aid location, each complete with its own instruments for minor surgery, and with bandages, blood plasma, morphine and sterile operating packs, so that, no matter what part of the ship was disabled by enemy guns, there would always be some equipped location where the medical department could function. This was the goal — even, so it sometimes seemed to Williams, the obsession — of Chief Bullitt.

For the wartime emergency a medical-stores warehouse had been set up on the Navy Pier at Boston, in an old loft building. Here, every morning, Bullitt would take his requisition form into an inner office on the main floor for the daily battle with the officer in charge. While he argued this through, Williams would wait in the outer office, where a chief pharmacist's mate sat at a desk, going over endless forms, with a cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth. Chief Durkin, as the name plate on his desk proclaimed him to be, was a heavy, dark, scowling man, but he was not unpleasant, and Williams sensed after a while that the brusque way in which he spoke to him about Bullitt covered an essential respect. Apparently the two chiefs had known each other for years.

"How do you get along with Bullitt?" Chief Durkin asked Williams one morning, bluntly, scowling over his cigar.

Williams shrugged. It was not one of his best mornings. McNulty's Cure was still ringing in his ears like the sound of distant sirens, and he was careful not to move his head too quickly because, when he did, swarms of small black beetles invaded the horizons of his vision. "We get along," Williams said.

Chief Durkin looked at him sharply, as if he feared some failure on Williams' part to appreciate Bullitt's real quality, and his tone and manner when he spoke again were rather aggressive.

"He knows his stuff, boy," Chief Durkin said.

"I know that, Chief," Williams said.

Mollified by Williams' understanding, Chief Durkin said, "It's been hard for him. It's hard on a man to be let down like he was."

Instantly, Williams' interest was aroused. Here, for the first time, was a man who might possibly throw some light on Bullitt's character and his curious behavior. "Let down, Chief?" Williams asked.

At that moment a very young, very new hospital apprentice came in, carrying his hat under his arm. He put a paper down in front of Chief Durkin, who examined it and spoke to Williams without raising his head. "Oh, you know. He was Activity Zebra."

Williams knew that name all right. Everyone in the Hospital Corps knew that name. Activity Zebra was the code designation that had been given to the great Navy medical organization which, trained as a combat unit, had gone on to the Pacific to take part in the historic landings, and had there covered itself with glory. Activity Zebra was one of the great names inscribed forever in the Valhalla of the Navy Medical Corps. The fatality rate of that unit was higher than that of any other combat medical unit in the Navy, for the Japanese snipers had used them as targets, picking out the Red Cross of the arm brassard, or mimicking the cries of wounded American Marines, calling out "Corpsman! Corpsman!" and shooting them as they ran into the open to give aid.

"Yes," Chief Durkin said, looking up at Williams now, the young hospital apprentice having made his nervous exit. "I thought you'd know that Bullitt was old Doc Brainard's boy. I suppose he doesn't want to talk about it. Admiral Brainard organized Activity Zebra, you know, and Bullitt was his right-hand man. Bullitt knows more about requisitioning and supply than any other man in the corps. It was Bullitt who did the requisitioning for Activity Zebra. It was Bullitt who set the standard. But when the unit was all ready to go, when they were all packed, with their gear on the dock, Brainard cut Bullitt's name off the draft."

"Why?" Williams asked.

Chief Durkin was silent for a moment. He rolled the cigar in the corner of his mouth, as if turning over with it the memory of the old injustice. "Nobody ever knew why," he said at last. "I don't think even Bullitt knew why. And after that," he went on, with his customary brusqueness, "Bullitt pulled temporary duty at the dispensary at Charleston while he waited for the orders that took him to the Ajax. Can you imagine a guy like Bullitt with dispensary duty? Taking cinders out of eyes? Bandaging fingers?"

Williams was silent. He thought he understood a great deal now that he had not understood before. This could explain the compulsion in Bullitt, the need to justify himself, the stubborn refusal, even in the face of active dislike, to request transfer from the Ajax. It might even explain the bitter cynicism which made him so disliked.

Williams was depressed, for himself as well as Bullitt. It had been a source of great satisfaction to him to have been, at last, accepted by McNulty and, through him, by the crew; to feel that he had gained their confidence and approval had given him new confidence in himself, and had lessened his sense of loneliness. He had learned how difficult It was for a man to live alone in this world where no man could act alone. But though it was a new world he found himself in, he would have to live there by the standards that he had brought from his own world. He could not betray his self-respect merely to gain the liking of others. He would have to tell McNulty again that he could not let Bullitt down.

Bullitt was more than usually disagreeable that day. From the medical-stores warehouse he managed to wheedle only a small supply of two- and three-inch bandage, and several odd bottles of iodine and aspirin, failing to get the additional blood plasma and morphine he wanted, and the surgical towels for use in making up more operating packs. He was allowed, after some argument, to have a twenty-five yard bolt of unbleached cotton cloth to make up into towels, and this Williams carried back to the Ajax, under one arm, with a carton of bandage in the other.

"They must think we have the women's sewing circle on board," Bullitt said, struggling along with the other boxes. "Do you think we might invite the admiral's wife m for tea?"

They spent the rest of the afternoon working on the twenty-five yards of cotton cloth. They tore it into one-yard lengths, tearing it to avoid a cut edge, which might fray. Then each edge was stitched with a double-fold hem, as an added precaution to avert the possibility of any frayed end or loose thread finding its way into a wound.

Williams found this highly improbable task interesting and amusing, as they sat facing each other in the sick bay, working with the needles and thread, looking, in their uniforms, like a parody of a scene from Jane Austen. In the days before, they had already made operating masks of gauze, with strips of tape sewed on, to be tied behind the head. They had made muslin cases to hold rubber gloves, the gloves carefully powdered with talc so that the fingers would not stick together in the heat of the sterilizing process. And they had prepared "C" sheets from ordinary bed sheets, with a double-fold hemmed incision in the center, so that a sterile field might be made around a flesh wound when the sheet was placed over a man, with the wound accessible through the slit. These "C" sheets, along with the gloves in their muslin cases, the gauze masks, and a certain number of towels, folded so that they would fall open when grasped by one corner, were placed in the packs for major operations, along with retractors, scalpels, needles and sutures in sterile capsules. The packs for minor surgery, which Bullitt prepared in far greater number, contained only a towel or two, gauze squares, bandages, and a needle and suture. The packs, both large and small, were then wrapped separately in muslin, and sterilized under pressure in the autoclave.

At last, as a result of requisitions that Bullitt had filed all the way from Norfolk to Newfoundland, they had their own autoclave — that gleaming, cylindrical steam chamber, which now sat in the corner of the sick bay facing the small sink. In the days before the autoclave arrived, Williams, if they were in port, had been sent with a great pile of carefully prepared operating packs to the nearest port dispensary or hospital, to have the packs sterilized there; or, with those prepared at sea, they had further wrapped each pack in layers of newspaper, and baked them in the galley oven, over the protests of the cook, who complained that the stench of singeing newsprint nauseated him. "But," as Bullitt said briskly, "since the smell of your cooking has the same effect on me, I think we will just ignore your pitiful cries."

Now, with the autoclave operating, Bullitt was like a housewife with a new machine. Everything in the sick bay had been sterilized at least once, and if he could have done Williams in sections, as Bullitt explained, he would have had him in there too.

That afternoon, as they sat sewing in the sick bay, the ship gently rocking at the dock, the shouts of the working parties coming to them distantly from the deck, a curious conversation took place.

"They want me to leave the ship." Bullitt said suddenly, without looking up from his needle. "Did you know that'"

"Know what. Chief?" Williams asked vacuously, stalling for time. How did Bullitt know? From someone goaded into anger, perhaps, or from the drunken revelations in some bar.

"Oh, cut It out," Bullitt said, folding a hem, and compressing it with wetted fingers. "I want to know this: are you in on it, too?"

"No," Williams said. "No, I am not." And what could he add to that? That justice meant more to him than his own feelings, his own likes or dislikes? Better to say no more.

"Your kind comes a dime a dozen," Bullitt said. "You know that, don't you? There are better corpsmen than you in any dispensary ashore. I could get you transferred like that," he said, with a snap of his fingers.

"Then why don't you?" Williams said angrily, feeling the blood rise in his face. "Don't do me any favors."

Bullitt laughed. "You're tougher than I thought, boy," he said, using the familiar address for the first time, and arousing in Williams a quick response of withdrawal and distaste. "I thought you were like all the other weak sisters on board. I thought you had to be ltl{ed. Don't think I don't know why McNulty has been sucking around here. I know his kind. I thought you were an ass, but I suppose it's just because you're so high class. Tell me, did you have to resign from the four hundred before you could go into the Navy as an enlisted man?"

"You'd better stop now, Chief," Williams said tightly, jabbing at the cotton cloth with his needle. "I don't like your talk."

Bullitt laughed again, as if pleased that he had drawn blood. "I am going to leave this ship, boy," he said, "but in my own good time. Do you think the Bureau would let me go into action to be killed with all you yard birds?"

Williams stopped his sewing and looked at Bullitt with silent astonishment.

"War is for civilians," Bullitt said in a tone of contempt. "War is for the faceless herd who go to the slaughter like sheep. Do you think it matters about you? No one will ever miss you. You're all expendable. But how the hell do you think they could run this war, boy, if they lost old hands like me?" He thrust the towel he had been working on aside, savagely, and picked up another length of cloth and began on that.

"Did they send me out with Zebra?" he asked, looking up at Williams. "You know about Activity Zebra, don't you?"

"Yes, Chief, I do," Williams said.

"And if they wouldn't risk me on Zebra, do you think they'd send me out into the Atlantic on a miserable tin can?"

Williams could say nothing. He bent his head, and went on with his sewing, automatically.

"I'm almost sorry for you," Bullitt said. "But of course," he went on, assuming his tone of elaborate mockery, "not all of us are given the chance to be heroes." He put aside the new towel, stood up and went to the autoclave. He spun the handle, opened the door, and peered into the steam like Mephistopheles at the brink of hell. "So, you didn't go along with the little plot, did you?" he asked.

"No, damn it," Williams said sharply. "No, I did not."

"It won't be a picnic, boy," Bullitt said, poking gingerly at the steaming operating packs inside the autoclave, and beginning to remove them, carefully. "You won't have any time for happy hour with your little playmates out on deck. I'm going to work your tail off, but you and I will show these fools how a job can be done."

"You make it sound delightful, Chief," Williams said.

"I'm not sure what will happen after I go," Bullitt went on, unmoved by Williams' sarcasm. "They're scraping so near the bottom of the barrel now that they may send you some drugstore cowboy all dressed up like a chief pharmacist's mate. Or," he shrugged, "you may have to go it alone. You, and Doctor Claremont. That combination should bring restful sleep to all hands on board."

Bullitt had emptied the autoclave now. He went to a lower shelf of a cabinet and took out a pillow case, knotted at the top, from which, after unknotting, he removed potatoes and eggs and lemons. "We won't take time out for chow," he said. He put the potatoes and eggs in the autoclave, spun the door shut, and turned the steam valve. Then he took a beaker from a shelf, cut two lemons in half, squeezed the juice into the beaker, threw the squeezed rinds in after that, and, after unlocking the cabinet where the drugs and alcohol were kept, reached for the bottle of alcohol and poured a liberal amount into the beaker. Meanwhile, he went on talking. "We are going to Guantanamo Bay after we leave here," he said. "We will be there for six weeks, for gunnery practice and maneuvers. Then we will go back to Norfolk to await orders." He had stirred the mixture in the beaker with a glass rod, and now he took down two smaller beakers from the shelf, and poured the mixture into these. "At least you will await orders," he said. "I will pick up my new orders from the Bureau — although no one but you must know that now. Oh, well," he said, handing Williams a beaker, and raising his own, "you who are about to die, we salute you."

Williams took the beaker mechanically, and while he sat there holding It the top half of the sick-bay door was flung open, and there was the unsmiling face of McNulty. It was Bullitt who spoke first. "I'd stay well if I were you. Boatswain's Mate First Class McNulty," he said. "For some men it doesn't pay to get sick."

"I'd like to see you. Doc," McNulty said, addressing Williams, pushing his hat back from his expressionless face.

Williams followed him out onto the deck, where they stood at the rail in the early twilight. "Have you made up your mind yet, Doc?" McNulty asked. "We only got a day or so left."

Williams' thoughts were too confused to permit him to speak at once. Was Bullitt right in what he said.^ With his ignorance of Navy ways, Williams would have to accept the possibility that he was. And if he was right, if he was going to be transferred from the Ajax before they went into action, then Williams needed him aboard, no "matter how unpleasant he was, no matter how disliked he was. For Bullitt was the most efficient, the most knowledgeable chief pharmacist's mate that he had ever worked under, and he needed to know absolutely everything Bullitt could teach him.

"I can't do it, Boats," Williams said. "I just can't do it."

McNulty spat into the water. "Okay, Doc," he said, in a level tone, his face set. "Okay."

"I'm sorry," Williams said. "I'm sorry as hell."

McNulty turned to go, but he spoke over his shoulder before he walked away. "If I were you. Doc," he said, "I wouldn't stand there on the deck with that glass in my hand."

Williams looked down, absently, at the beaker in his hand, at the disorder of cranes and derricks on the dock.

McNulty had reached the microphone of the public-address system of the ship. The lonely, personal note of his boatswain's pipe sounded through the dusk. "Now hear this," he called. "Now hear this. Sweepers man your brooms. Sweepers man your brooms. Clean sweep down fore and aft."

Williams threw the beaker from him. It smashed into fragments against a stanchion of the dock.

Chapter 4

TWO DAYS later the Ajax sailed from Boston. When the crew mustered on deck, the ship was already under way and conditions were by no means pleasant. A chill, wet wind blew in from the port side, the sky w^as lowering and gray, with thunderclouds overhead, the water of the outer harbor was choppy, and ahead of them lay the open sea, flecked with the whitecaps of great rolling waves. Back in the sick bay after muster, Bullitt was busy securing all loose gear. There was apparent in his manner a change in his attitude toward Williams, an implicit suggestion that he had accepted him now, not on Williams' terms, but on his own, as if it would never occur to him that Williams' terms, whatever they were, had validity in themselves. And Williams was depressed by this; it came to him, for perhaps the first time in his life, that in some instances a position of neutrality or disinterested justice is impossible, that any stand is a decision, and that what he had done, in effect, was to accept Bullitt himself, and, by so doing, reject McNulty and the others.

"When we hit the open sea they'll all be sick," Bullitt said briskly. "It's bad enough after liberty in any weather, but this will be marvelously hideous. However," he said, scooping up an armful of the operating packs that had been taken from the autoclave, and putting them away into a lower cabinet, "don't call me. I'll be below having the vapors. When they come to you, gasping and retching, just stack them up in the passageway like cordwood. But under no circumstances try to do anything for them, unless you want to just throw them over the side."

With these instructions, Bullitt disappeared, opening the door of the sick bay onto an increasingly turbulent outside world, where McNulty and the deck crew were busy stringing the life lines along the sloping deck. When he had gone, Williams locked the door and lay down on the deck on his back, spread-eagle. All the late hours, the excesses ashore had hit him at once. An aluminum dressing tray fell to the deck, where it rattled noisily back and forth with the pitching of the ship, but in spite of that he fell into a kind of sodden half sleep.

When he came to and stood up and opened the sick-bay door again, it was almost noon. The AJax had passed through the heart of the storm, and the open sea glistened ahead of them under a blinding sun. Williams went out to the deck, and, holding to the life line, made his way to the weather deck and looked over the side. From the bow ahead the waves broke cleanly and fell back, like the mane of a giant sea horse, like sculpture caught in motion, whiter at the crest than the white of paper, while the sea through which they moved was a deepening blue, like the blue at the heart of a sapphire. Salt spray streamed from the bridge and the weather deck, and foamed and bubbled swiftly away under his feet.

The fresh air made him feel that he might be able to eat his lunch, and he went back to the passageway, which passed midships from the starboard to the port side, to take his place in the chow line. The meals for the men were served from steam tables in the compartment at the foot of the port ladder. It was also a sleeping compartment, but during the day the bunks were pulled up and hooked against the bulkhead, so that the men could sit on benches at long tables with their trays. Today the men m line, grasping the life line as they waited, were unusually silent, and carefully turned their heads away as they passed the galley door, where the cooks braced themselves with widespread feet as they tended the cooking pots on the railed top of the stove. When Williams, in line, got to the bottom of the ladder, he knew that coming to chow had been a mistake. The pitching compartment below was a kind of comic inferno. Boys suddenly sick fought their way up the starboard ladder to the open air, and their abandoned trays slid across the tables and fell to the deck, awash with roast veal, gravy and mashed potatoes. In this others fell, and picked themselves up to fall again. Williams slipped and fought his way through this as well as he could and made his way up the ladder. He went back to the sick bay, passing on the way the second cook, Butler, an enormously fat young man, who was getting his revenge for the taunts he took by eating a large chunk of greasy pork in his bare hands, which he offered to the boys running to the rail to be sick.

Williams held the noon sick-call hour alone, dispensing soda-mint tablets and aspirin. Neither Doctor Claremont nor Chief Bullitt appeared, and after the hour had passed he closed the door and stood with his back braced against it, surveying with a lost feeling the small, closed space to which his world had shrunk. There were various places aboard ship where the men gathered when they were off duty. There were the midships boatswain's locker, and the locker on the forecastle, and the "blue room," where the gunnery crew gathered. The tables were always up for cards or letter writing in the after crew's quarters; off-duty black-gang boys met to talk and drink coffee in an engine or boiler room, and the deck crew sat on the fantail to beat their gums when they were off watch. But Williams would not be really welcome in any of these places without McNulty's tacit approval. There were a few solitaries on board who were permitted to survive in their own right — a difficult but respected role; Sullivan, the captain's yeoman, was one. Williams would have to try again to go it on his own.

The ship moved less violently now, more predictably, so that he could brace himself for its rise and fall. He took his Hospital Corps Manual down from the sea shelf, braced the chair against the bulkhead, and sat down with a determined effort to apply himself to his studies. Since Bullitt had spoken to him about going into action he was haunted by a feeling of apprehension about his limited knowledge. The pharmacist's mate of a destroyer on which McNulty had served had saved the life of his skipper, hit in the throat by a shrapnel fragment, by holding together the severed ends of a vein until the doctor had reached the bridge. Would he have the wit and ability to do that? A good pharmacist's mate, Williams had been told, always carried a fountain pen with him, because after extracting the point and the ink tube and cutting off the other end, the empty pen cartridge could be slipped into a man's trachea, in case of throat injury, and prevent him from choking to death. And if a man's leg or arm was blown away, just where were the pressure points to prevent fatal hemorrhage? He had been "taught those in Hospital Corps School, and he had gone back again and again to his textbook to memorize the procedure, but when Bullitt told him these things the explanation remained in his mind.

Williams had never seen action, as McNulty had once pointed out, but at least he felt he had enough hospital experience to recognize that a man like Bullitt was uncommon. In Navy hospitals, his record showed, he had invariably been assigned to the emergency room, because of his skill. His years of experience had made him practical and decisive. He would say, "You hold your hand here. Your fingers held this way. You hold it here with this much pressure, where you can feel the bone beneath the artery." He would demonstrate on Williams' body, and then he would say, "Now, do it to me." They would bandage each other's arms or legs for fracture, or tie a leg as for a traction splint.

Possibly it was true that Bullitt had contempt for men in general, but he was not indifferent to them, as Doctor Claremont was. Doctor Claremont was by nature and by training a surgeon. Williams imagined he must be excellent in an operating room, with a technician standing by the head of the patient to administer the anesthetic, with someone to check the blood pressure and someone else to hand him the instruments. He could see Doctor Claremont so busy with immediate concerns he would not have time or cause to look at the patient's face, half hidden, anyway, by the apparatus of anesthesia.

Doctor Claremont was a man who took his profession seriously. The weight of its noble history since Hippocrates rested on his thin shoulders. He was a doctor, Williams felt, who would walk, not run, to the nearest disaster, believing in the expediency of deliberation. But death, as Williams had learned, was no respecter of persons or their presumptions, no matter how professional these presumptions might be, and so he felt much safer with Bullitt, who was more at home with calamity in the open air. With so many things to remember— the element of shock, the pressure points, the safety margin of time involved in the application of a tourniquet before gangrene became a threat — with all these things to hold in mind it was always possible that Doctor Claremont might forget to include in his calculations the inexperience of Williams, a factor that Chief Bullitt would never forget.

And thinking these thoughts, Williams flung away his textbook. He stood up and opened the sick-bay door to the outer world. To a new world, glowing with sunlight in a sky of flawless blue. The ship moved easily through great, calm swells with a sound that was like the sound of singing. The life lines were down, the deck was dry. The members of the crew off watch stood talking in groups along the rail, in clean dungarees and spotless hats. And along the deck, toward the sick bay, came a curious figure. It was Bullitt, moving with his peculiar air of precision and elegance, wearing freshly starched and crisply pressed khaki, with his chief's hat at a jaunty angle on his head. He was carrying an aluminum pitcher, and he smiled when he saw Williams at the sick-bay door. He came inside, and Williams heard the metallic clink of ice in the pitcher, and smelled the pleasing aroma of cut lemon.

"Anyone for cocktails?" Bullitt said, going toward the locked cabinet for the bottle of alcohol.

Williams laughed with an enormous, lifting sense of relief, and closed and locked the sick-bay door.

AS THE SHIP proceeded south through calm and sunny waters, the improbable sense of being on a pleasure cruise heightened and grew. At noon, during the lunch hour, jazz records were played from the bridge, over the public-address system, the program arranged by Ole Jensen, quartermaster first class. Jensen's favorite, "The Carnival of Venice," a Harry James record, was played almost incessantly until it was unfortunately dropped and broken by Ensign Cripps, on communications watch at the time. It was darkly assumed that no accident was involved here, and the incident merely served as one more mark against one-way Cripps. Perhaps it had been done as a sort of revenge, for it was Ensign Cripps who felt that part of the noontime happy hour should be devoted to news broadcasts. Jensen bolted his food below, or carried what he could back up to the bridge with him, to avoid this catastrophe. After all, if you were fighting the war, you certainly should not be required to listen to reports about it.

Besides, the younger boys wanted to dance. When chow had been downed, the tables were folded back and the boys jitter bugged in the open space. There were rather stern rules about changing roles: no one wanted to have to follow all the time, since the lead partner was apt to be rather more violent with a male partner than he would have been with a girl. Once, in being propelled backward in a spin, Billy Becker had cracked his head so hard against an upright that he was forced to lie down until he stopped seeing stars.

In the evenings, a passion for writing love letters swept the ship. Now that Boston and its women lay behind them, purer thoughts turned toward the girls back home. In the language of the Ajax a girl was not the same as a woman. A girl was somebody whom you might marry someday; a woman was a very different kettle offish. Almost every man had a girl somewhere. He carried her photograph in his wallet, usually taken in a bathing suit squinting into the sun, and on occasion these photographs were exchanged for inspection, with certain solemn rules of imposed behavior. When you looked at the picture of a man's girl, you did not smile. Especially, you did not whistle. You examined the picture carefully and quietly, and then you returned it, your expression a grave blend of awe, respect and repressed envy.

The writing of love letters was, in some ways, a communal affair. Many of the boys turned to young Turnbull, the storekeeper striker, who possessed not only a happy felicity of phrase but also a dog-eared copy of How to Write Love Letters, by Cordelia Wither-spoon, with appropriate chapter divisions under such headings as "How to Patch Up a Quarrel," "How to Write to a Girl Already Spoken For by Another," "How to Profess Undying Love from a Distance." Particularly skillful letters were passed from hand to hand, and in the warm, crowded after crew's quarters, under the bleak, overhead lights, the young lovers would sit perspiring in their skivvie shirts, and laboriously, with frowning, intent faces, copy out passages from the letters of others (being warned profanely not to crease them or leave fingerprints or drop perspiration on them) for letters of their own.

Doctor Claremont, except for the required hours of sick call, rarely came to the sick bay, and then his attitude was purely technical and remote. He played chess in the wardroom with Lieutenant (jg) Arthur Palazzo, the first lieutenant of the ship's organization, and the only officer on board with whom Doctor Claremont shared any friendship. It was a curious friendship, between two men very unlike each other, but perhaps they were brought together because both men, although for different reasons, maintained a certain detachment from the other men on board.

Doctor Claremont was detached because of his loneliness and his concern for his wife, alone with her first pregnancy, and also because he felt that he might have been assigned a more useful place in time of war. He could never adapt himself to the alien life at sea. Lieutenant Palazzo, on the other hand, found shipboard life at sea so familiar that it never occurred to him to examine it at all, or to look at the men who shared it with him. He was a fine specimen of a young man, with an excellent appetite and nerves of steel, to whom the men beneath him were merely faceless numbers in a division. The routine work of the ship went forward under McNulty and Chief Kronsky, while Lieutenant Palazzo was content for the most part to sit in the wardroom and play chess or drink coffee with Doctor Claremont.

Two days out of Boston, Ensign Cripps came down with the embarrassment of measles, and Tyler Williams was assigned to care for him. Ensign Cripps was quarantined in the small sea cabin on the bridge, to prevent the outbreak of a general epidemic. Young Cripps was bored and lonely in his quarantine, but even if he had been permitted visitors it was doubtful if anyone would have come. As he explained to Williams, looking with distaste at the tray of food Williams had brought to him, the other officers were interested only in cards and women, or women and cards, and how could he talk about books or anything interesting with them?

Williams was careful not to rise to this. Under ordinary circumstances he would have taken up this attempt by Cripps to alleviate his boredom. Cripps was a so-called ninety-day wonder; he had been given his commission out of an Eastern college after ninety days of Navy training. He was an open-faced, friendly young man, who might have been one of Williams' own students. Tom Cripps had once come upon Williams reading Walden in the sick bay, and when they had talked briefly about books the familiar student-teacher relationship had suddenly come into being, and Williams had seen on Cripps' face that young, open curiosity, like a well waiting to be filled. But Williams had resisted any further overtures of friendship, and he resisted this one now, for neither of them could have handled a friendly relationship after Cripps was well again.

A friendship between an officer and an enlisted man was untenable. It had been explained to Williams again and again in his training days that this rigidly enforced distinction was not based on snobbery or class distinction (although Williams privately liked to amend this to not merely snobbery or class distinction), but had its reason in the unarguable premise that in times of action and emergency, instant, unthinking obedience must be expected of enlisted men by their officers, and if the line of demarcation was not always firmly held, if it was relaxed for a moment, this might weaken the whole fabric of command.

"What do you think of Kafka?" Cripps asked, stirring restlessly on his rumpled bunk, looking up at Williams with his earnest, pock-marked face.

"I don't think of Kafka much these days, sir," Williams said, pouring a glass of water from a pitcher, and handing him a pill.

"Oh, come off it," Cripps said, tossing the pill into his mouth like a peanut. "I'm bored in this cell. Talk to me."

"Yes, sir," Williams said. "What shall I say, sir?"

"Oh, go to hell," Ensign Cripps said, turning, and thumping his pillow with his list.

On the following afternoon another overture of friendship came from a very different and surprising quarter. While Williams was alone in the sick bay, "Red" Sullivan, the captain's yeoman, came in and settled down for a chat. Williams was a little guarded at first, thinking there might be a revival, here, of the Bullitt plot, but Sullivan's manner was so casual and indirect that Williams dismissed this idea from his mind after a few moments. Apparently Sullivan, a matter-of-fact young man, had accepted Williams' refusal to take any part in the scheme.

Sullivan, by his assignment, occupied a position unique in the ship's organization. The chain of command went from Captain Thompson to the executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Mortimer Gould, a career Navy man of the third generation of a career Navy family. Commander Gould was the sort of man who, if asked quickly who he was, would not reply that he was an American citizen, or a man, or even a human being. He would say that he was an officer in the United States Navy, and his tone would suggest that, as such, he was absolutely immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

The liaison between Commander Gould and the captain, the buffer between the executive officer and the crew, was Yeoman Sullivan. His somewhat stooped young shoulders bore the responsibility of the endless routine paper work, so that Captain Thompson and Commander Gould might have some free time to sail the ship and conduct the war.

Sullivan was a slender, tall, intelligent young man. It infuriated him to be taken for a citizen sailor, a mistake understandable enough, since he looked so much like the many other intelligent young men whom the war had brought into service. Sullivan was Regular Navy, and to prove this to all he was twice as obscene and profane as any other enlisted man on board. Williams wanted to tell him not to try so hard to be a sailor and a man.

As captain's yeoman, Sullivan was forced into a lonely and proud isolation. No man dared approach him without suspicion of his motives, because there were favors Sullivan could do; knowing this, Sullivan had to make the first move if he wanted a friend.

Williams concluded that this explained his visit. He was pleased that Sullivan had sought him out as a friend. He listened with what interest he could display to Sullivan's monologue about the intricacies of the ship's organization.

"What do you do up there on the bridge when you have the watch?" he asked Sullivan, as they drank coffee together.

"Why don't you come up and see for yourself?" Sullivan said.

"I thought the crew was supposed to stay away from the bridge while the ship was under way," Williams said.

"Oh, that doesn't mean you, Doc," Sullivan said. "I tell you what. Tomorrow I have the eight-to-twelve on the engine-order indicator. Why don't you come up and have a look around?"

Williams thought that sounded fine.

The following morning, when he had cleared the sick bay after sick call, and Bullitt had left him to go below, he closed the sick bay and climbed the ladder to the bridge. It was a clear, warm day. The Ajax was proceeding at twenty knots through a ground swell off Cape Hatteras, moving rhythmically from side to side, so that a man braced his legs automatically and moved with it. Ensign Webster, of the engineering department, was the officer on watch. Ensign Webster was fresh from Annapolis, and he still lived so strictly by the book that in any undefined situation he simply froze into place like a setter, with correct posture and expression, the very model of what a young ensign should be. He did not acknowledge Williams in any way when he came into the cabin. He merely looked up with a frown.

Sullivan was at the engine-order indicator, wearing earphones, his back to Williams. He turned and nodded, as if too absorbed in his duties for any further display of welcome. At that moment Captain Thompson came onto the bridge. He was happy that day, happy as only a sea captain can be when his ship is under way. "Why, Williams," he said, with smoothly affable surprise, "what brings you up here?"

In that moment Williams knew he had walked into a trap. Sullivan did not move, but Williams, from the corner of his eye, saw a wicked smile deepen on his averted face. Williams reddened, but he kept his voice controlled.

"I just wanted to look around, Captain," he said. "I like it up here, sir."

Captain Thompson smiled widely. "Williams likes it up here," he said, addressing himself, as royalty might, to the impersonal ear. "In that case, Sullivan, you might as well turn the earphones over to him. We'll have to make him useful."

Sullivan removed the earphones and handed them to Williams silently, without meeting his eyes. He then left the bridge as quickly as he could, and for the remainder of Sullivan's watch Williams was subjected to the delicate torment of Captain Thompson's amusement, and the confused, nervous exasperation of Ensign Webster.

He never did quite understand what he was supposed to be doing. The adjustments he made, as instructed, on the dial before him guided the engine-room crew below. Williams was to repeat the orders addressed to him by Ensign Webster, from Captain Thompson, into the speaking tube, as he adjusted the dial accordingly, and to hear the order repeated in confirmation from below. A simple procedure, perhaps, with practice, but in a matter of moments Williams stood sweating between the shouts of angry confusion from below and the icy corrections of Ensign Webster, the whole scene warmed by the benevolent smile of Captain Thompson, who was happily inventing a series of small and rapid changes in speed.

When Becker relieved the watch, Williams stumbled below in search of Sullivan. He found him in the ship's office, smoking a cigar, his feet up on the desk.

"That was a hell of a thing to do," Williams said.

Sullivan removed the cigar from his mouth and looked at it gravely. "Somebody had to give you the word. Doc," he said. "I just wanted to see if you could take it. And besides," he added, "if you had told the skipper that I asked you up there, well. ." His voice trailed off significantly, and he made a gesture with the side of his hand as if cutting his throat.

Williams looked at him, at the ridiculous, solemn manliness which he wore like a coat too large for him, and he began to laugh.

On his way back to the sick bay he stopped for a moment and stood at the rail on the starboard side, ruefully amused by the fact that Sullivan had made a fool of him, and yet pleased that Sullivan had taken the initiative to make him his friend. It was still warm and bright, and several boys, off duty, had stripped to the waist and were sunning themselves, dozing on coils of line. He heard a voice behind him, and it was Bullitt. "I have been on better cruise ships," the chief said, "but after all, I suppose this is the best one can expect in wartime."

Williams turned, but Bullitt's appearance so astonished him that he couldn't speak. Bullitt was wearing only a pair of swimming trunks, cork-soled bath slippers and, inevitably, his chief's hat. "I have tried wearing my stripes on my arm," he said, "but the pins do hurt."

"Oh, hell, Chief," Williams said. "Don't make such an ass out of yourself."

"Don't get so excited on your first cruise," Bullitt went on. "Everyone who is anyone goes south at this season."

McNulty had come up with a working party to chip paint, and he looked up now, hearing the absurd intonation of Bullitt's voice. "I'll be up on the sun deck," Bullitt said, and as he caught the flat, disapproving look in McNulty's eyes a wicked gleam of amusement came into his own. "And you, too," he said to McNulty, "why don't you join us there after vespers?"

McNulty spat over the rail. "Come on, you punks," he called loudly, ignoring Bullitt. "Get the lead out! What do you think this is, a pleasure cruise?" The tone of his voice would not deceive his boys. They knew McNulty, and McNulty knew them.

Williams went back to the sick bay and slammed the door behind him. The momentary pleasure he had felt in Sullivan's newly tendered friendship vanished. It didn't matter what friends he had, or even whether or not he had any friends. In the eyes of the crew he was associated with Bullitt. He had made his bed, he said to himself, and now he was damned well going to have to lie in it. Bullitt was drunk. You could smell the alcohol five paces away.

Chapter 5

THAT EVENING, Williams sat alone in the sick bay, reading, the call to general quarters sounded, the quick, shrill siren, the demonic cry which rose and fell and touched the nerve ends as if they had been seared by a hot iron. Williams sprang to his feet. Instantly, automatically, he did the things he had been trained to do. He strapped his deflated rubber life belt around his waist, flung his first-aid bag over his shoulder, jammed his metal helmet on his head, opened the door — an act which extinguished the lights of the sick bay — and raced along the passageway and forward on the deck.

In this moment no one spoke; there was no sound but the siren crying and the heavy feet of running men on the deck, and in the act of running Williams saw, from the corner of his eye, a glow of color; he turned his head briefly to see a ship burning on the horizon, with a great, majestic cloud of flame and smoke above it.

The contrast of the officers' wardroom with the activity on deck left him standing motionless for a moment in the room, as if he had wakened from a dream. Although the wardroom could scarcely be considered a luxury accommodation, it seemed so to Williams under the circumstances of life aboard the Ajax. He helped himself to a cup of coffee from the glass pot steaming on the electric hot plate. It was the best coffee on board, although the men did not envy the captain and the officers their special cook, Martinez, who sometimes stirred a cooking pot with the long ash of his cigar poised perilously over the brim.

Williams stood with his cup and listened for sounds from outside. He had no communication with anyone, nor any knowledge of what was taking place on the ship once he was inside this closed room with its covered portholes. As he stood there, a rustling sound caused him to look up with a start, and then he laughed, for curled in a corner of the pipes overhead was Stewart Brown's pet monkey.

Naval regulations stated that no man could have a pet on board without the express permission of the captain, but when Brown had climbed the gangway in Boston with the monkey on his shoulder, Captain Thompson, with his customary smile of indulgence, had insisted upon only one restriction — Brown could have the monkey on board if it had been properly inoculated. Brown had at once produced the inoculation paper, which had been given to him, along with the monkey, by a Merchant Marine sailor whose skipper had ordered him to get rid of the pet.

The monkey, which Brown promptly named Lover Boy, quickly became the object of affection of the entire crew. They wanted to hold Lover Boy and play with him, as they would do one day — although presumably the instinct behind this action did not occur to them — with their own children. They wanted to comfort him and pet him and feed him chocolate. Lover Boy, however, had no desire to be adopted by human primates, and consequently the free members of the crew spent a great part of each day in peering down ventilator shafts or into dark corners, searching for the glowing, pinpoint, frightened eyes. He was threatened with complete nervous collapse, as well as constipation from a surfeit of Hershey bars.

Brown had brought him to the sick bay one afternoon, languid in his arms, with bloodshot eyes and a coated tongue. Bullitt had wrinkled his forehead in solicitous thought. "I know I ought to recognize him," he said, apologetically. "I suppose he's a member of the black gang. It's so hard to tell them apart." He administered mineral oil with a little cascara, and advised rest and a light diet. "Do try to keep your friend in his bunk," he said to Brown, in a reassuring tone. "I'm sure he'll pull through, and I'll take him off the watch list the very moment I can remember his name."

Now, looking down at Williams, Loser Boy made a grimace and covered his bright, senseless eyes with his tiny, jewellike hands. The silence had become intense. Williams could tell, by the absence of vibration, and by a peculiar listless motion of the ship, that the engines had been cut off. This could mean only that a submarine had been sounded, or was suspected, below them. He carried his cup of coffee to the table and sat down. By habit, he kept his helmet on his head. The wardroom was directly below a five-inch gun mount, and he had learned from experience that when this particular gun was fired some of the light bulbs in the overhead would explode and shower him with broken glass. He selected an ancient copy of The National Geographic from the table.

He leafed through the magazine, sitting tautly, as if poised above a keg of gunpowder. His mind would not be diverted. And yet in practice drills this room had never failed to exercise its own soporific effect, for here had been established a military decorum, a timeless isolation, which nothing could ever touch. An elaborate tea and coffee service in silver sat on the railed sideboard. The members of the crew had bought this from their pay ("contributed" was the word they used, after being informed, somewhat to the astonishment of the civilian sailors, that sometimes the crew bought the silver tea and coffee service for a new ship). Mrs. Thompson, the captain's wife, had poured from it for the officers and their wives, after the ceremonies, on the day the ship was commissioned. (The members of the crew, who had bought the service, were permitted to bring their wives or guests for coffee from an electric urn in the quarters of the chief petty officers.) Martinez kept the silver service beautifully polished, possibly with his own cigar ash, for all Williams knew. Gray curtains of spun glass hung for privacy at the inner door of the wardroom, just as they did at the doors of the officers' cabins. Spun glass would not burn.

Doctor Claremont, who had once been invited aboard a British corvette for dinner, had explained to Williams, in one of his rare bursts of conversation, that the officers on board the Ajax actually lived in almost Spartan simplicity in contrast to the English officers on board the corvette. There was a wood-burning fireplace in the wardroom of the corvette, with a circular upholstered sofa in front of it, on which the officers sat and were served a Martini before dinner. Liquor being forbidden on American warships, quantities of canned grapefruit juice were consumed aboard the Ajax, but the same social order prevailed on both ships; the captain in his quarters, the officers in their rooms, the men below, neatly filed away in their bunks like bodies in a catacomb.

The ship trembled and began to move again, and a moment later the public-address system crackled into life, and the word was passed to secure from general quarters. Williams threw a fast salute in the direction of Lover Boy and went out to the deck.

Most of the crew stood at the rail. On the horizon the burning ship still stood soundlessly under its pillar of flame and smoke, but it was more distant now. They were leaving it. There seemed to be a cruiser and two destroyers standing by. Since very little information ever filtered down from the bridge, or since very little information might actually be known there, it was unlikely that the crew would ever know just what had happened.

Chief Bullitt had left his station in the sick bay and stood by the rail, watching the burning ship recede on the horizon. He was properly dressed now, and reasonably sober. Williams hoped to slip by him in the darkness, but Bullitt turned and saw him. "Ah, there you are," he said. "Come and have a front-row seat."

Williams stood beside him, reluctantly, but drawn by the terrible fascination of the scene. He did not speak, but even in the silence he could sense that fastidious detachment from the action taking place, that attitude, on Bullitt's part, of what might be called an academic interest in the war. "Think," Bullitt said with the tone of false heroics, "think of the millions who are being denied these pleasures."

All night the ship proceeded at a speed which was certainly in excess of thirty knots. The rattling, like that of a heavy truck traveling at reckless speed over an unpaved road, made sleep impossible. Williams was relieved to hear the sound of reveille in the morning, but the great speed produced a numbing vibration that made his teeth chatter when his feet touched the deck. He found it advisable to keep his jaws slightly apart to prevent the chipping of enamel.

The Ajax was coming into either the beginning or the end of a storm. Under the overcast sky, gray with lowering clouds, the seas began to mount in labored masses of water, which raised themselves up, with a kind of angry exhaustion, into great rolling waves. Into these waves the Ajax plunged, moving on an irregular course, which convinced the crew that submarines were suspected in the vicinity.

After a hurried breakfast — coffee and scrambled eggs eaten from a tray which had to be anchored by the hand holding the coffee mug, and swallowed between chattering teeth — and after duty in the sick bay. Williams went out again to the deck. All of the crew free from watch had gathered on the port side, and there, running parallel to them, was another destroyer of the same class, the USS Hero, presumably on its way to join them for maneuvers at Guantanamo Bay.

It was a fascinating sight to see this sister ship under steam beside them, as if they looked at themselves in a mirror. Williams had never quite realized before how long, clean and graceful the Ajax was, how alive and proud. The life lines had been put up again, but the crew stood holding to the rail, unmindful of the heavy seas. At this speed, waves broke over the weather deck and ran swiftly backward, so that the fantail of the Hero, and presumably that of the Ajax, trailed streamers of water like flowing banners of silk.

The free crew members of the Hero stood at the starboard rail of their own ship, and as the two ships sped forward like racing greyhounds they shouted back and forth across the intervening water, exchanging place names as they always did in such instances, as if to invoke from their anonymity the origins that gave them their identity. "Boston!" they called. "Brooklyn!" "Texas!" ("Yip-peee!") "Ioway!" "Ioway!" But when a figure appeared on the bridge of the Hero with a megaphone, all hands on the Ajax fell silent and motioned to the members of the opposite crew, pointing, to call their attention to the man on the bridge of their own ship.

The figure on the bridge of the Hero raised the megaphone to his mouth, and across the foaming water, above the sound of the seas, came the long cry, "Ho, Ajax!'' "Ho…! Ajax…!"

Captain Thompson appeared on the bridge and stood waiting.

"Prepare to take a message by line!" the figure on the Hero called hoarsely. "Prepare — to — take — a —message — by — line. .!"

Instantly, activity broke out on the Ajax. While the speed of both ships slackened imperceptibly, and their courses held steady, McNulty waited forward on the port deck with three of his picked boys, Clancy, Pozericki and MacDougal. Above the sounds of the sea could be heard the urgency of McNulty's voice as he shouted instructions. "Hold yourselves ready, men!" he called. "But stay clear of the weather deck! Never go to the weather deck when the green seas run!" And Williams could see, leaning over the rail and looking forward, that in this stormy light the masses of water that mounted the bow of the Ajax were, indeed, as green as an emerald.

At that moment, from the Hero, came the sound of a faint but sharp discharge, and a line, thin and swift as a coral snake, darted across the water. It fell short. It was drawn back. Again the gun sounded. Again the line darted out and fell, agonizingly, short, with Clancy half over the rail, MacDougal holding him by the belt. Again the gun fired. This time the line flung itself over the rail of the weather deck, and Pozericki, unmindful of McNulty's warning, and moved by that quick fearlessness which had won him his place as one of McNulty's picked boys, ran forward to seize it. At that very moment a great wall of green sea swept over the weather deck and threw him with crushing force against the bulkhead.

What happened then happened in tense silence. The mass of water, retreating, left Pozericki in its wake, on his back inside the rail, one leg twisted in an unnatural way beneath his body. Wordlessly, McNulty fell to the deck and crept forward, grasping at whatever pipe or rail might hold him. He inched forward, then dragged Pozericki back as another wave swept over them and left them drenched, but safe, clinging to the rail. It was then that Williams heard for the first time the cry he had heard so often in his mind. It was Chief Kronsky. "Corpsman!" he called. "Corpsman!"

Almost by the time Williams had reached McNulty and Pozericki, Bullitt was at his side. A Stokes stretcher hung from brackets welded to the bulkhead, forward of the galley. Bullitt pointed toward it, and Williams brought it. Pozericki was conscious, but he was pale with shock. Four members of the crew who had been trained as stretcher bearers stepped forward, as Bullitt and Williams and McNulty lifted Pozericki into the stretcher. They fastened the webbing straps across his chest and abdomen, and across the divided sections for the legs; then the bearers picked up the stretcher and carried him aft, toward the ladders that led to the crew's quarters. As he followed with Bullitt, Williams heard again the report of the line gun from the Hero. He turned to see MacDougal, with firmly braced, widespread legs, and sun-bronzed head flung back with an air of triumph, pulling the line in, hand over hand. Behind it was the heavier line, to which the metal cylinder bearing the message was attached.

It was Pozericki's right leg; the bone was broken just above the knee. Doctor Claremont was called from the wardroom. He came to the after crew's quarters in his deliberate way, his expression grave and impersonal, his manner calm and unhurried. The Ajax had picked up speed again, and the vibration produced so much noise in the compartment that ordinary conversation was difficult.

Bullitt had already sent Williams to the sick bay, with brief, shouted instructions. He was to bring splints, muslin, gauze and webbing bandage and a morphine syrette. When he returned, Doctor Claremont administered the morphine in the thigh, after Williams had cut away Pozericki's dungarees. A crowd of curious crew members had gathered in the compartment and stood, pressing forward, in silence. Doctor Claremont ordered them back to the deck.

The setting of the broken bone, in a healthy young man with well-developed muscles, was a difficult problem. After several attempts, Bullitt took charge, and, with Williams and Doctor Claremont pulling, Bullitt, with great skill, reduced the fracture, bringing the broken ends back into place. It was touch and go whether they would remain in place without traction. Williams and Doctor Claremont maintained the tension while Bullitt splinted the leg and bound it. The construction of the Stokes stretcher itself, divided and shaped for the legs, would help. If they had expected to be at sea for some time they would have devised some makeshift method of traction. But since they were presumably near their destination, Doctor Claremont decided that they would simply keep Pozericki in the Stokes stretcher, and hold the leg in place by binding it to the metal webbing.

Stephen Pozericki, a large-limbed, white-fleshed, strong young man, endured all this with silent, stoicism and an unchanging expression. His face was deathly white, but he groaned only once, when the bone ends were set in place.

Doctor Claremont issued instructions for his care. Williams was to remove the rest of Pozericki's clothing and rub him dry, briskly, with a heavy towel. He was to be kept covered with woolen blankets, and persuaded to drink all the liquids he could tolerate. Williams was to stay with him to see that he came through the first few hours without any complications, and to check at intervals the deliberately exposed area of the bandaged leg to make certain that the splint had not been bound too tightly, affecting the circulation. After he had undressed Pozericki and rubbed him dry and covered him, Williams went to the galley for a pitcher and a mug. When he came back, Doctor Claremont and Bullitt had gone, leaving him with McNulty, who, now in dry clothes, stood over Pozericki with one calloused hand on his damp forehead. He was speaking to him in a paternal voice rough with sympathy. "You wouldn't listen to me, would you, boy?" he was saying. "Does it hurt bad? Can I do any damn thing at all for you, boy?"

Pozericki's eyes were glazed now with morphine, and he ran his tongue over dry lips. "I'm sorry, Boats," he said. "It was all my fault, Boats."

At lunch time, Pozericki was persuaded to drink some canned grapefruit juice and to sip a little soup from a mug. Williams was explaining that he must drink all he could to offset the dangers of shock when he suddenly heard the word "Attention!" spoken loudly and firmly behind him, and he turned to see Stewart Brown and Captain Thompson coming down the ladder stairs of the compartment, followed by Doctor Claremont. The off-duty boys, writing letters, or reading in their bunks, silent with sympathy, sprang to their feet and stood at attention, with their hands at their sides. Even Pozericki became rigid and still in the stretcher.

Captain Thompson placed one hand on his arm, and his pleasant, authoritative voice was filled with genuine warmth and concern. "Are you all right, boy? Are they taking good care of you?"

"Yes, sir," Pozericki said, moistening his lips, staring straight up at the bunk over his head.

"You are going to be all right," Captain Thompson said. "We will get you to a hospital as soon as we can."

Doctor Claremont checked the splinting and the bandage. He gently pulled the dressings aside here and there to see how much edema there was, what tissue damage was revealed, to look for capillary hemorrhage. He explained to Captain Thompson what had been done. He did not speak to Pozericki.

During an endless afternoon and night, Williams did what he could for the comfort of Pozericki, restless and half-drugged, sweating under the blankets in the warm compartment. In the morning he filled a washbasin with warm water m the sick bay and took it back to the after crew's quarters. The night hours had marked a great change in Pozericki. He was numbed and dazed with pain. He looked unseeingly at Williams with bloodshot eyes, set in a gray unshaven face. Williams gave him a codeine tablet, with a mug of fresh water. He brought Pozericki's washcloth and towel and soap and shaving gear from his locker, and cleaned him up. Pozericki was in an agony of discomfort from the rigidity of his enforced position in the Stokes stretcher. Williams had put a folded blanket under him, between him and the metal frame of the stretcher, but he was afraid to move him now, to massage him or try to ease his discomfort.

Williams went up to the galley, drew a mug of coffee and took it back to Pozericki. He waited with him until he had drunk what he could, and until he could see that the codeine had begun to take its merciful effect. Then he went out on deck.

Ahead of them, luminous under the sea haze, was the outline of land, the low hills of Cuba. Williams walked to the bow and stood at the rail. Any land, when approached from the sea, seems to rise from it, and to be cleansed and purged as it does. No matter how disappointing it may prove to be on arrival, how squalid, or untidy, or uninviting, from the sea the rise of land seems to hold fresh promise, the hope of new beginnings.

Bullitt had gone to the bow also, and when he saw Williams he beckoned to him and swept out his arm in a wide gesture toward the approaching land. "Do join me," he said, "for the grand entry into Guantanamo Bay."

Chapter 6

AGAIN, as at Argentia, there was not dock space enough for the L. Ajax to tie up. They were to drop anchor in the wide harbor. Other ships had preceded them there, and they were to be followed by still more, but there was a feeling of isolation and loneliness in the vast expanse of tropical blue water under the brilliant sky, with the spare vegetation ashore, where the few buildings of the Marine Base sat in an empty paradise, like toy houses in a child's landscape of cardboard and sponge-rubber trees.

The first order of the day was to remove Pozericki to the hospital. The whaleboat had been lowered on the starboard side, and when this had been done it was remembered, too late, that McNulty had not yet rigged the lines to lower the Stokes stretcher by winch. Usually above reproach in his duty, McNulty had postponed this task, possibly because Bullitt had asked him so many times to do it. Lines were to have been secured at either end and at the sides of the stretcher, and bound to a center ring, so that the stretcher could be lowered skillfully by a single line, without tilting at either end. Since this had not been done, it was necessary to lower the stretcher by hand. It was difficult for the boys handling the lines to coordinate their movements, and the result was that Pozericki, even though he was cared for by loving hands, had a rather bumpy and painful descent to the whaleboat. He endured this with the same pale and rigid stoicism that he had exhibited from the first.

McNulty sat beside him in the boat, Clancy held the tiller, Mac-Dougal was the engineer. Williams, last to come down the accommodation ladder, carried Pozericki's health record and ditty bag, in which he had packed his shaving gear. He had also put in the bag the picture of Pozericki's girl, which he had taken from inside his locker, a high-school graduation picture of a pretty, placid girl in white cap and gown, holding a diploma, standing against a background of a flight of school steps, with a sculptured figure of Abraham Lincoln off in the middle distance.

The whaleboat wheeled about and started off toward the shore. McNulty leaned over Pozericki, talking to him in a quiet, earnest tone, and Williams could see that there were rebellious tears in Pozericki's eyes, dark-circled in his set face. "Sure you'll come back," McNulty was saying. "If you aren't well by the time we shove off, we'll pick you up at somewhere else. Maybe at N.O.B. Maybe at Charleston. But we'll get you, boy," he said. "We couldn't get along without you, boy."

"I should have listened to you, Boats," Pozericki said. "It was all my fault, Boats." He drew his forearm across his eyes, an arm of firm white flesh, covered with coarse black hair.

The hospital at the Marine Base was a large white bungalow, covered with flowering purple bougainvillaea and filled with sunshine and quietness. Pozericki, the Stokes stretcher placed on a wheel stretcher, waited in the admitting room to be received. It was likely that after his leg had been X-rayed, the bone reset if necessary and properly cast, he would be flown to a hospital on the mainland for recovery. McNulty, Clancy and MacDougal said good-by to him awkwardly there, standing on either side of the stretcher, their roughened hands on his arms. "We'll pick you up somewhere, boy," McNulty said again, trying to put into his voice the conviction he did not feel. This time Pozericki said nothing. He closed his eyes, and his friends filed quietly outside.

While they waited there for Williams they learned, in conversation with the ambulance driver, that there would be no liberty beyond the base for them while they were at Guantanamo Bay. The nearest village had been placed out of bounds the week before. As in so many communities disrupted by the conditions of war, venereal disease there had run rampant; it had reached epidemic proportions. One third of the crew of an entire ship had become infected, which incapacitated that ship as effectively as if it had been torpedoed.

A disconsolate silence fell on the group as they thought of this inaccessible sink of iniquity. To substitute for these illicit pleasures, the ambulance driver explained in a voice devoid of enthusiasm, motion pictures were flown down from the mainland and distributed, in turn, to the ships, and USO shows were sent down to perform in the recreation hall ashore.

From the beginning, it seemed destined that nothing should go right at Guantanamo Bay. That afternoon, at their first scheduled antiaircraft-gunnery practice, the gun crews of the Ajax were so inept that the target plane trailing the sleeve above them requested them to desist, and the Ajax was ordered to return to its mooring.

This incident, which angered and humiliated Captain Thompson, led, by an unfortunate and illogical chain of events, to Stewart Brown's fall, that long-feared and unhappy climax to his role of captain's boy. Coming down from the bridge to confer with Chief Kronsky about the message from the target plane, Captain Thompson passed Lover Boy eating a stalk of celery. Back in his cabin, after the Ajax had secured in its disgrace, Captain Thompson summoned both Brown and Chief Tomkins, of the supply department. "On this entire cruise," he said to Chief Tomkins, his face flushed, "I have not been served any fresh celery myself, but just now on the deck I passed the monkey eating a stalk. How did this come about?"

Chief Tomkins was plainly baffled. "I don't know how, sir," he said. "We did take some celery on at Boston. It's in the stores. But I haven't issued any."

Captain Thompson stood up and came around from behind his desk to face Brown. "How did you get it then, boy?" he asked. "Did you take the key and go to the stores on your own?"

Stewart Brown had then answered with an impertinence. Afterward, Tomkins could not remember exactly what he had said. He had been too startled by Brown's behavior and by the captain's reaction. What Captain Thompson had done was to slap Stewart Brown across the face. The report of this action — so unlike Captain Thompson, so contrary, indeed, and in such defiance of Navy orders and regulations — dumfounded the crew and filled them with a sense of anxiety. It was true that Stewart Brown had betrayed the captain's regard, and, playing the part of favorite to the king, had done so from the beginning; but Captain Thompson, the father figure of the ship, the godlike symbol of ultimate authority, had betrayed himself and revealed his human weakness.

Brown was sent below. He sat on his bunk, sobbing, but no one approached him. It was all over, and he knew it, and everyone else knew it. He had fallen like Lucifer, never to rise again.

The next morning, after muster, captain's mast was held on deck. A chastened Stewart Brown, with pale face and downcast eyes, appeared before Captain Thompson and the formed ranks of the officers and crew free from duty. For his insolence and insubordination he was sentenced to three days of solitary confinement on bread and water, and restricted to the ship for a period of four weeks. Captain Thompson's voice was crisp in the open air, his manner impersonal. The crew, at attention, was sad in its silence.

Brown, in the custody of the master-at-arms, was taken to the sick bay for a routine examination by Doctor Claremont, to determine if his condition permitted the sentence to be put into effect. Doctor Claremont pronounced him fit, and he was taken below. Since no brig existed on the Ajax, a storage space designed for the storage of perishable food, with bars covered with wire netting to permit the passage of air, was designated for this purpose. Brown's bedding was placed inside, and a watch established around the clock, not only to guard Brown but to take him to and from the head.

Opinion about the incident and the sentence varied among the crew. McNulty, a man of strong feeling himself, could understand the captain's reaction; but the captain had slapped Brown, and in the light of that he thought the sentence was a little excessive. It would take some time and effort to restore the damage done to the morale of the crew.

Bullitt, however, professed to be disappointed. "I do wish he had had him either lashed or keelhauled," he said, a bit wistfully. "Especially keelhauled. Mercy, that would have relieved the boredom of it all. As it is now, the whole place is as cheerful as a slave ship."

As HE had watched Bullitt set Pozericki's leg, Williams' old feeling of ambivalence about the chief had returned — admiration for his skill, tempered by exasperation at his behavior. But Bullitt had now resumed his cruise manner, and there was a scent of lemon and alcohol in the air. Stripped to his swimming trunks, and wearing his chief's cap, he was playing solitaire in the sick bay, with the cards spread out on the treatment table. "We must amuse ourselves," he said to Williams, riffling the cards with an air of elegance. "Since we cannot have liberty beyond the base, I have worked out a daily itinerary for us, after a discussion with the games director. In the morning there will be the grand exit from Guantanamo Bay. Grand, of course, to be spelled with an 'e.' After lunch a loll on the sun deck. At sundown, the grand entry into Guantanamo Bay. Cocktails before dinner. And movies on the boat deck. If time lags there is always parcheesi or shuffleboard."

Williams, cleaning up the sick bay, was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to answer the chief. At lunchtime he had taken the bread and water below to Brown, with the Ajax under way once more to its point of practice rendezvous. As he climbed down the ladder to the hold, he was reflective about another aspect of his role of pharmacist's mate at sea. In unpacking the supplies for the sick bay that had been brought aboard at Norfolk, he had been startled to come upon a box that contained several copies of the Roman Catholic missal, a few rosaries of black glass beads, and half a dozen copies of The Book of Common Prayer. He remembered then having been told at Hospital Corps School that in the absence of a chaplain the role of spiritual adviser and comforter was to be assumed by the pharmacist's mate. Was it his duty now to find some words to comfort Brown: The present instance seemed almost classical. Bread and water, and spiritual comfort.

But, possibly because of his unfamiliarity with the role, Williams could not reach Brown. The guard outside the makeshift cell, an inarticulate young seaman named Clark, unlocked the door, and Williams went inside. Brown was lying on his bedding with his face turned to the wall. Williams placed the bread and the mug of water on the deck. He put his hand, tentatively, on Brown's shoulder. "Are you all right?" he asked. Brown did not stir. "Is there anything you need.'" Williams asked. Again, Brown did not move, or respond. Williams left him, feeling a little inadequate. Somehow, he thought, he would have to learn to discharge his role of spiritual counselor in a more effective way.

That afternoon, perhaps because of everyone's awareness of Brown in his cell below, held in the heart of the ship like a warning symbol of the consequences of man's imperfection, the gun crews did better. They did, in fact, quite well. Captain Thompson was pleased. He had it announced over the public-address system that a movie would be shown on the forecastle that evening.

When they secured from practice late that afternoon, Clancy was sent ashore with Lover Boy with instructions to find him a new owner. He found a coxswain from an aircraft carrier, who took Lover Boy, complete with his inoculation certificate; and Ensign Cripps remarked that it was too bad Lover Boy didn't keep a diary of his adventures, so that each new owner might profit from the experiences of the one before.

After chow, Clancy, MacDougal and a few of their satellites set up the portable movie screen on the forecastle. The more lowly members of the crew were put to work setting up seats. Aluminum chairs were brought from the officers' country and ranged in two rows; back of these were benches for the crew.

Some time before the captain and the officers appeared, the crew was all in place, waiting, in good humor. They scuffled and laughed, they skylarked and made catcalls. The word "Attention," spoken by Sullivan from the rear, brought them to their feet in silence, while Captain Thompson and his officers made their way forward to the aluminum chairs. Privilege is not without its drawbacks, as they would be reminded when the film was projected on the screen immediately in front of their faces.

After a few abortive beginnings, with sounds of loud, accelerated dialogue from the sound track, and rapid, incomprehensible flashes on the screen, Ole Jensen, at the projector, brought things under control, naturally not without some rather insulting and pointed comment addressed to him, sotto voce, by his shipmates. On the screen before them the lined, passion-worn face of young Frank Sinatra appeared, magnified a hundredfold, and from the sound track poured the smooth, slurred notes of his song.

It was too much for the boys. They yelled and booed with delight, for they darkly suspected that the place of honor where their pictures hung on the bedroom walls of their girls at home was shared also by pictures of the face before them. They screamed, "Oh, Frankie!" in falsetto tones. They clutched one another in mock embrace. They swooned in the aisle.

Seated on a bench beside Williams, Bullitt looked with remote distaste at Billy Becker and young Stanley, who, scuffling and embracing, had fallen into the aisle at his feet. "Mercy," he said, "I must speak to the purser in the morning about our seats."

Overhead, on routine flight, a reconnaissance plane moved like a dark star among bright stars, all mocked by the flickering patch of lighted screen, while the vast tropical night was filled with a soaring song of love.

The next day was Sunday, the second day of Stewart Brown's confinement. Williams went down to him at dinnertime with some concern. Brown had eaten nothing since the sentence was passed. He drank quantities of water, but Williams would always find the bread untouched, spurned with a stubborn pride. At dinner that evening they had been given a fresh apple for dessert, and Williams smuggled one down to Brown inside his shirt, after a thoughtful weighing of his two responsibilities, his duty to obey orders and his role as spiritual comforter. Surely a single apple might be considered more spiritually comforting than physically sustaining. But Brown spurned that, too. He was standing with his back against the wall of his cell, his arms crossed, regarding his feet. Williams sent the guard to the water fountain with Brown's mug, and then he offered the apple through the barred door; Brown looked at it without any change of expression, and he did not unfold his arms. "Take it," Williams said. "But eat the core, too, so you won't be found out."

"No, thanks," Brown said, coldly, Williams put the apple back inside his shirt, and when the guard returned he went up to the deck again.

In the sick bay, Doctor Claremont was examining Kerensky's throat. That afternoon, with no maneuvers scheduled, a baseball game had been organized ashore, the officers and chiefs against the enlisted men. This was standard practice, with the generally predictable outcome based on the premise that it was probably better to have the enlisted men win. Doctor Claremont, watching from the sidelines, had seen Kerensky seized with a fit of coughing after sliding in to home base. He had asked him to come to the sick bay for examination at evening sick call.

Kerensky had come to the sick bay before, with an extremely sore throat. Doctor Claremont had said then that the tonsils should be removed, but not while the throat was so inflamed. (Doctor Claremont always employed the impersonal article in speaking of parts of the body, as if they existed apart from the self.)

Now, Doctor Claremont declared that Kerensky's cough was a result of the chronic infection of his tonsils, and it was imperative that they be removed. Doctor Claremont would discuss it with the captain. Since Kerensky was so vital a member of the crew it was possible that the captain would not wish him sent ashore for surgery. The operation might well be done on board, possibly on the following Sunday, while the ship was anchored and still in the bay.

This was rather surprising to Williams. Doctor Claremont, good surgeon that he was, was firmly opposed to any emergency operative procedure unless it was absolutely necessary. Williams had learned this on the trip from Norfolk to Argentia, when a young seaman named Rostal had appeared at the sick bay with the classic symptoms of appendicitis. He was doubled over with abdominal pain, his face was green with nausea, and there was acute tenderness at McBurney's point, that spot midway on an imaginary line drawn from the navel to the thigh.

This was at a time when there had been considerable publicity in the newspapers about emergency appendectomies at sea, when, as Bullitt pointed out, almost every ambitious pharmacist's mate had removed at least one appendix with a can opener, nail scissors and a rubber band. But Doctor Claremont had ordered Rostal to his bunk. An ice pack was placed on his abdomen. His temperature was taken at frequent intervals, and he was given nothing by mouth except the sip of water necessary to swallow the prescribed pheno-barbital. At the end of two days Rostal had so recovered that he persuaded Doctor Claremont not to send him ashore for operation at Argentia. He was brought back to Boston to be hospitalized.

It did not occur to Williams that Doctor Claremont's decision to operate on Kerensky might be influenced by his loneliness and boredom, just as neither one of them had any way of knowing of the tragic climax toward which this incident would be the first step. At the time the decision seemed fairly unimportant. Doctor Claremont was badly in need of diversion of some kind, and for him a tonsillectomy was as good as a night on the town, although he rationalized it in a different way when he came to discuss it in the sick bay. For a healthy boy like Kerensky it would scarcely be any inconvenience at all. He would be off the watch list for only a few days, and the captain needed him on board. Also — and this was the reason Doctor Claremont put forward with most emphasis — the experience would be of enormous future value to Williams. He hoped, in fact, as he said to Bullitt with diffidence, that the chief would stay away from the sick bay so that Williams would be completely on his own as assistant. Bullitt's reaction to this was to sniff haughtily, and to leave the sick bay without a word.

Williams passed him later, on the deck, standing at the rail. Throwing his head back in his characteristic way, so that his nose looked almost hawklike, he said, "I do hope you two will enjoy playing house together."

Brown, at Captain Thompson's order, was released the next afternoon at four o'clock. When the ship secured from maneuvers, McNulty found him below, showered and shaved and in clean dungarees, sitting on the edge of his bunk, his expressionless face held down, his hands open and lax between his knees. McNulty stood in front of him, feet braced wide, hat pushed back from his sunburned face, one thumb hooked in his belt. "Look, you stupid punk," he said, with an exaggerated roughness of tone, "I'm going to make a man out of you if it kills you. Now, come along."

McNulty usually had chow with men of his own stature, such as Kerensky or Jensen, but tonight he sat with Brown, whose pale, set face looked even paler beside McNulty's burned, impassive one. Brown did not look up or speak as he ate, and there was a suspicion of angry moisture in his eyes, but he ate ravenously — three slabs of roast beef, a mountain of mashed potatoes which he forked up with canned peas — and washed all of it down with mugs of fresh milk. Afterward, McNulty had him put on the eight-to-twelve watch list, and Stewart Brown, former captain's boy, was well on his way to becoming Stewart Brown, deck seaman.

As the week went on, every afternoon, after sick call, while the ship wheeled and turned, while the antiaircraft guns rattled, while the sick bay shook as torpedoes were launched without warheads from the tubes above them, Williams and Doctor Claremont busied themselves with preparations for the coming Sunday. Bullitt pointedly absented himself from these activities, and Williams noticed a constantly diminishing supply of alcohol.

Williams unpacked Doctor Claremont's instruments, brought up from the medical-supply room below, and as the doctor explained their uses, he seemed, almost for the first time on the cruise, to be completely happy and absorbed.

While they examined, cleaned and sterilized the instruments, they rehearsed the operation. Since this was not an operation in which the abdominal wall would be opened, the limited sterile conditions of the sick bay would not constitute a hazard, but for the sake of Williams' training they would go about the operation with every regard for technical detail. The small treatment table in the sick bay would be lowered and covered with a sterile sheet, and the surface of the nearest cabinet would also be covered with squares of sterile muslin, to enlarge the work area. Doctor Claremont and Williams would wear sterile gowns, sterile caps, sterile masks and sterile rubber gloves.

At half past five in the morning, Williams was sent below with a small sedative for Kerensky. He wakened him from a deep sleep to give it to him. At this healthy period of his youth, Kerensky awoke instantly, his clear eyes expressionless as china. He listened impassively while Williams told him to take nothing to eat or drink, and to be ready, in clean clothes, in half an hour.

Back in the sick bay, Williams helped Doctor Claremont with the last-minute details. Kerensky was to sit upright in the aluminum chair, his head held in place and supported by an improvised bracket. When this was in place, Williams was sent below again for Kerensky. He came up sleepily, dressed in clean dungarees and a clean white skivvie shirt. Doctor Claremont, scrubbing at the sink, instructed Kerensky to sit in the metal chair. Williams then scrubbed, and he and Doctor Claremont got into their gowns, caps, masks and rubber gloves. Kerensky was swathed in a sterile sheet, the treatment table and the cabinet top were covered with their sterile cloths, and Williams then opened the sterile operating pack.

This whole procedure, so commonplace to the trained personnel of any hospital, struck Williams, with his hasty and inadequate training, as having an element of ritual drama about it. He was fascinated by the superb functioning of Doctor Claremont, the use of the word "functioning" coming to him as it might if he were watching the activity of a machine. Doctor Claremont had explained to him in advance that the tonsils were set in tissues rather like small onions, and that they must be peeled, in a sense, to be removed, but always with the utmost care, since if a minute blood vessel were cut before it was absolutely necessary, the field of operation would be obscured by the flow of blood.

After the local anesthetic had taken effect, the operation itself was accomplished in a matter of moments, the tonsils removed with scarcely any flow of blood, and the sutures placed with dispatch. During the entire operation Doctor Claremont had not addressed a single word to Kerensky.

Afterward, Williams led the still impassive Kerensky back to his bunk. He would watch out for him for a day or so, until Kerensky felt like being up and about, seeing to it that he had special dishes from the galley, ice cream, mashed potatoes or fortified milk drinks.

Doctor Claremont had gone when Williams returned to clean up the sick bay. He would wash and polish the instruments himself later; the linens he rolled in a bundle to take down to the laundry room. His back was turned to the door when Chief Bullitt came in, and he was startled and dismayed to detect the scent of alcohol. He had never known Bullitt to drink in the morning.

He turned to greet him, and Bullitt stood and surveyed the disorder with icy scorn. "Thousands of infants," he said dryly, "have been born successfully under less favorable circumstances."

Chapter 7

ONE WEEK later to the day. Seaman Pawling, who worked in the laundry room, injured his hand in the washing machine, and Chief Bullitt was given an opportunity, which was to have tragic consequences, to demonstrate his impatience with what he regarded as the excessive care taken in the removal of Kerensky's tonsils.

Seaman Pawling was, in a way, the Jonah of the Ajax. He was nineteen, with buoyant spirits, an untroubled face, and a love of practical jokes. In the beginning he had been very popular with his shipmates, but he was so emotionally immature that in the end he merely succeeded in irritating almost everyone.

He had come on board the Ajax, as had most of the deck crew, in a draft, that faceless group from which identities gradually emerged. Tommy Pawling was one of the first to emerge, because of his open, outgoing manner, his love of horseplay, and his healthy nature. It took some time for his shipmates to discover that what one saw of Pawling was all there was to Pawling. He was completely lacking in any sense of personal responsibility; he could not take part in any community activity, since he could not remember from one moment to the next what he was supposed to be doing.

When this happy specimen came aboard the Ajax, Chief Calder was delighted to take him into the engineering division, since Pawling was, as he himself said, "mechanically inclined." In the engine room Pawling was a joy to all, and ruined everything he touched. Although it would seem that the Ajax at sea was several fathoms above the nearest available sand, sand found its way into gears, parts meant to be oiled burned out, and parts meant to be wiped dry were hopelessly gummed with grease. Calder at first endured all this with patience. After all, everyone had to be trained. "Take it easy, now," he would say. "Pay attention. Look alive." When his patience was tried very gravely, he put Pawling on report, hoping to teach him a lesson. Pawling was confined to the ship for a week, a circumstance which dismayed him not at all, so happy was he with putting bolts into shipmates' mattress covers, waiting with a mug of ice water to pour on the head of a friend emerging from a hot shower, or tying wet clothes into knots on the lines where they had been hung out to dry.

Finally, however, it all came to an explosive head when Pawling destroyed a complicated part in an expensive piece of machinery, and Calder threw him out of the engine room in a monumental rage — a rage increased by the fact that Pawling was so amused by the expression on Chief Calder's face that he could do nothing but laugh.

McNulty then took Pawling on the deck crew, over Chief Kronsky's objections. Lieutenant Palazzo backed up McNulty; after all, Pawling had to do something. The first thing he did was to enrage Stud Clancy when, in attempting to lower the gig. Pawling let the running fall slip from his hand when he heard McNulty say, "Stand back handsomely!"

"You stupid jerk!" Clancy shouted, as the boat slipped and the lines fouled.

"But handsomely!" Pawling said, convulsed with laughter. "Handsomely! Yoo-hoo!"

The result was that the moment the boat was drawn back and secured, Clancy hit Pawling in the mouth and split his lip. McNulty pulled them apart, with Clancy shouting, "Don't you want to be a sailor: Do you want to be a civilian all your lifer" Clancy's eyes were hot with anger as McNulty drew him aside, and talked to him at the rail, his own eyes warm with regard. Clancy breathed heavily. "He fouled it up!" he kept saying. "We almost had it, just perfect, and he fouled it up!"

After that, Pawling went to the galley to assist Martinez, the officers' cook. His shining face and infectious laughter brightened the corner where he peeled potatoes, but when Martinez saw how slowly and wastefully he peeled them, how careless he was with any task assigned to him, the Puerto Rican was reduced to speechlessness after exhausting all the maledictions of his own tongue. These foreign words so amused Pawling that he began to imitate Martinez in a kind of gibberish and fell to the floor with laughter, but when Martinez picked up a handy meat cleaver and threw it at him Pawling ran to the deck, yelling for McNulty.

McNulty soothed Martinez by offering him a cigar, and he took Pawling by the arm, as if he were a small boy, and led him below. An idea had come to him, but he said nothing until they had reached the laundry, which was run by a seaman named Harris. "You, too, can release a man for active duty," McNulty said to Pawling with what was, for the boatswain, an unusual note of irony and humor.

So Hams was brought up to join the deck gang and Pawling stayed below in the laundry. Away from everyone else and from the provocation to stir up trouble, he did a fair job. He did especially well after Captain Thompson assigned Ensign Webster to go down and stand over him at the ironing machine and make him press the same shirt over and over again until it was done to Webster's satisfaction.

But there, on Sunday, one week after Kerensky had his tonsils removed. Pawling caught his left hand in the machinery, and tore the back of it open. It was early afternoon, and the men had gone ashore again to defeat the officers and chiefs in the ritualistic baseball game. Almost everyone was ashore, even Doctor Claremont, who had gone to the base hospital to watch an intricate operation scheduled for that afternoon.

Bullitt and Williams had been together in the sick bay for morning sick call, but Bullitt had not appeared at noon. Williams did not know if he had gone ashore with the others or if he was below. Williams was just locking up, thinking that he would like to go ashore for a swim, when Pawling came running along the deck, his hand streaming blood. "Look, Doc, look," he said. "I've hurt my hand."

Williams hastily unlocked the sick-bay door and took him inside. He pulled the treatment table down and sat Pawling in the chair beside it, with his injured hand placed there on a towel. He did what he could to arrest the bleeding, applying pressure with gauze squares. Pawling was unable to tell him exactly what had happened. With his gift of "being mechanically inclined," he had apparently decided to amuse himself on this Sunday afternoon by taking the washing-machine mechanism apart to clean and oil it. Somewhere in the process he had accidentally started the motor by brushing against the switch, and his hand had been caught and the back of it ripped open. Williams could see, when he removed one gauze pad to replace it with another, that the tendons and muscles were laid bare. He placed a number of these pads beside Pawling, and told him to continue the pressure while he went below to see if he could find Chief Bullitt.

Williams rarely went to the chiefs' quarters since, like the officers' country, it was out of bounds for lesser ratings. Today the small wardroom of the chiefs' quarters was deserted, and Williams stood there hesitantly for a moment, uncertain of what to do. It was the first time he had been faced with an emergency while he was absolutely alone. Even Captain Thompson was ashore, watching the ball game. The injury to Pawling's hand needed treatment, Williams knew, more professional than he could administer. He would probably have to try to get someone to take him, with Pawling, in the small boat to the base hospital, across the bay. As he stood there, he thought he heard heavy breathing, and he went to the curtained passageway that led to the quarters where the chiefs' bunks were. He pulled the curtain aside, and saw Bullitt, asleep in a lower bunk. His instinctive reaction was one of relief. He went to waken him, but when he leaned over him he smelled the heavy scent of alcohol.

Afterward, in the way we retrace our actions and mentally rearrange them when it is too late to alter the consequences, he wished again and again that he had simply gone away and left Bullitt asleep. But his military training, relatively brief as it was, had already supplied him with certain automatic reflexes. He was never to act independently, in the presence of a superior, without that superior's instruction, and so now he leaned over Bullitt and shook him, to waken him. Bullitt groaned and moved and opened his eyes.

"Chief, I need you," Williams said. "Pawling has injured his hand, quite badly, and I can't take care of it by myself."

Bullitt looked up at him for a moment blankly, from rheumy eyes, as if he did not know who Williams was, or where he was himself, but then, without saying anything, he pulled himself up on the edge of the bunk. He was fully dressed, and he sat there for a moment, as if waiting for his head to clear; then, still without speaking, he got up and made his way to the door. Williams followed him. Bullitt's walk was uncertain. He lurched against the ship's rail once, and the toe of his shoe caught on the raised sill of the sick-bay door when he went to step inside. He stood over Pawling, removed the compresses, and examined the injury, still without speaking.

If Pawling felt pain, he did not show it. He had found his laugh again. "I sure tore up my hand, didn't I, Chief?" he said, as if it were some comic feat for which he would be rewarded.

Bullitt went to the sink and began to wash his hands.

"Shall I go out and see if I can get someone to man the small boat?" Williams asked.

Bullitt turned to him, weaving a bit. "Why?" he asked.

"Doctor Claremont isn't on board," Williams said. "I thought you would want to take Pawling to the base hospital."

"I'm in charge here," Bullitt said. "No one asked you to think."

Williams was reminded of Bullitt's early attitude of rudeness, before he had accepted him, and had turned the rudeness into travesty. Now that he thought about it, Bullitt's attitude toward him had been different ever since the operation on Kerensky. Had he resented being left out of that? Had he felt his self-appointed position as head of the sick bay threatened? Or was he jealous, preposterous as that might seem, of the relationship between Williams and Doctor Claremont before and during the operation, as if it were a betrayal of the order of loyalties that existed between men on a ship?

"Will you help me as you are," Bullitt said, as if in answer to his thoughts, "or shall I wait while you put on your mask and gown?"

Williams said nothing. Bullitt cleaned the wound. He sprinkled it with sulfathiazole powder and covered it with gauze compresses spread with petroleum jelly. He bandaged the hand and bound it to a hand splint with the fingers flat. From a square of muslin he fashioned a sling over Pawling's shoulder, and he placed the bandaged hand and forearm in this, upward, to slow further bleeding. Williams helped m this procedure silently, with a feeling of concern, his confidence in Bullitt's judgment gravely undermined for the first time. It was completely wrong, of course, for him to attempt to treat a man while he was drunk, but, aside from that, Williams had a strong conviction that the injury to Pawling's hand needed more complicated treatment than a mere bandage. It was possible that the muscles or ligaments or nerves on the back of his hand had been damaged.

"There," Bullitt said sharply, when he had finished. "Now go back to your hole. Why is it always the most useless members of the crew who cause the most trouble? See if you can't keep yourself away from moving parts for the rest of the afternoon so that I can get some sleep."

Pawling laughed and let himself out of the sick bay. "Don't forget to take me off the watch list," he said.

"Of course I won't take you off the watch list," Bullitt said. "Do you think a scratch on your hand entitles you to a vacation." He left the sick bay, again catching the toe of his shoe on the sill, and made his way a little uncertainly toward the chiefs' quarters.

On the following day, Monday, the Ajax was assigned to crash-boat duty with the Jove, an aircraft carrier practicing flight maneuvers. This meant that she must be prepared at a moment's notice to launch the small boat in a rescue operation for any young pilot who might miss the flight deck and plunge into the sea.

It had been a busy morning for Williams, since, on the night before, during the run of a movie on the forecastle, almost one third of the crew had been struck with food poisoning. It did not take Doctor Claremont long to track down the guilty agent. After the baseball game the cooks, coming back late to the ship, had served up as part of an impromptu supper the remainder of the cold meat and potato salad that they had taken ashore for lunch.

It was not a serious disorder, but under the circumstances it was certainly uncomfortable and inconvenient, even if not without its comic aspects. Boys sat on watch with pails beside them, the heads were crowded with a passing stream of groaning, retching victims, and in the still, tropical night the entire ship had a distinct and unpleasant odor, like an untidy children's nursery during an epidemic of colic. Doctor Claremont felt that no extraordinary steps were indicated, but he did post Williams to a special watch on the dishwasher, to make certain that the mess boys, in their eagerness to finish this disagreeable task in the steaming quarters below deck, would not fail to leave the serving trays in the washer for the length of time required to sterilize them.

After that it was a relief for him to take up his appointed place on the deck beside the small boat, with his life belt and first-aid bag. In case of emergency the small boat was to be launched with McNulty, MacDougal, Clancy, Chief Bullitt and Williams, and they stood together by the rail. Watching with hands cupped over their eyes against the sun, they could see only dimly the organized activity on the Jove. Planes manned by young pilots, untried by war, took off and landed in sequence. Signal pennants flashed, men walked or ran, and an atmosphere of tension communicated itself even as far as the Ajax.

Suddenly, from out of the glare of the sun, a plane came in uncertainly, wobbling a bit in its flight, as if flown by an extremely inexperienced pilot. It overshot the flight deck of the Jove and plunged, in a spray of foam, into the space of water between the Ajax and the Jove.

In a matter of minutes, with shouted instructions from McNulty, the small boat, the crew aboard, was lowered, the falls let go, the sea-painter cast off, and with MacDougal at the tiller they were speeding toward the place where the plane had come down.

The plane had gone down like a stone upon hitting the water, but they could see the pilot afloat. He bobbed in the water in his life jacket, but by the time they reached him he had gone into shock. His blond head, held above water, fell listlessly to one side. They brought the boat as near to him as they could, while Clancy stripped down to his shorts. He dived over the side and held the young pilot, propelling him toward the boat, where McNulty and MacDougal pulled him aboard. A Stokes stretcher waited in readiness, lined with blankets, and with a pillow in one end; they placed him in this gently and covered him with the blankets.

It was impossible to determine if the unconscious young pilot was injured at all beyond shock. Chief Bullitt, stooping over him as the boat sped toward the shore, raised one eyelid with the side of his thumb. The pupil of the eye was not dilated, which would seem to indicate an absence of head injury. Bullitt felt his pulse beneath the blanket. It was low but steady, as his respiration was, except for a deep sigh now and then, as if he struggled for more air. Wordlessly, Bullitt took a small bottle of brandy from the first-aid pack and broke the seal. No liquid could be given to an unconscious man, for fear that he might choke, but Bullitt held the open flask beneath the pilot's nostrils, and presently his eyes opened, astonishingly blue in his clear young face.

"Where am I?" he asked.

"In the men's bar at the Ritz, of course," Bullitt said briskly, holding the brandy to the young man's lips.

The young pilot drank the brandy. Color returned to his cheeks. He moved and tried to rise, but Bullitt held him back. "Lie still," he said. "You will need all of your strength for your court-martial."

The pilot sighed: with a plane lost, he would have to answer in court for his possible negligence. Reminded of this, an expression of pain crossed his face, and he closed his eyes again. The small boat sped on, back through the bay, through the channel, and toward the boat landing of the Marine Base. Ahead of them they could see an ambulance with a red cross painted on its side, summoned to the dock for the emergency by message from the Ajax.

Returning to the Ajax, Williams felt a sense of mysterious depression, a kind of anxiety and apprehension. The downed pilot, Kerensky's throat, the boys vomiting in the head, Pawling's hand — a sequence of mishaps, none of them of fatal consequence, yet all of them seeming in some way to threaten the fabric of their life, as if even Captain Thompson's ready authority, the youth and vigor of the crew, and the sustaining comfort of the daily routine could not really stand between them and protect them from the dangers and the impermanence and the unpredictability of life. The injury to Pawling's hand was a sort of symbol — the hand, stretched out toward experience and life, maimed and rebuked in its reach.

Underneath all this was a feeling of guilt from which Williams could not free himself. He had not told Doctor Claremont the night before about Pawling's hand. When Bullitt had gone back to his quarters, Williams had delayed in cleaning up the sick bay, hopeful that Doctor Claremont would return while he was there, and he would have reason to explain what had happened. After he had finished the job he went out to the deck and stood, in the early dusk, at the rail near the gangway, torn by indecision. It was not his place, certainly, to report his immediate superior to their superior above. His code of behavior rebelled at such a thought. He was not a talebearer, a child running to teacher.

But which was more important, a principle, perhaps superficial in concept, or the state of a man's hand? His indecision angered him.

When Doctor Claremont did return, finally, the confusion brought about by the sudden onset of food poisoning in the crew had made it impossible to tell him about Pawling. Williams had been relieved of the necessity of telling him, but this mechanical solution to his indecision, instead of relieving him of his feeling of guilt, seemed only to increase it.

And the day was not yet finished with them. When the ship secured from maneuvers that afternoon, a small boat approached from the base and the Reverend Luther Foss, Protestant chaplain of the base, climbed the accommodation ladder. In a small Georgia town, in the house where she had borne Stud, Mrs. Artemus Clancy had died. Word had come to Guantanamo Bay through the American Red Cross Home Service, with a request for leave.

Captain Thompson had Stud brought to his cabin, and when he arrived the captain excused himself and went to the bridge. Captain Thompson was a man of simple and profound religious belief, but he was impatient with most ministers. Too many of them, he thought, felt it inappropriate to approach God with the full vigor of their manliness. It was his opinion that most of them smiled too much, and too easily, and the words they used, such as "fellowship," seemed to Captain Thompson to be almost meaningless, like old coins which had had too much handling. When Captain Thompson attended religious service he sat erect in the pew, with his chin pulled in and his neck and head straight. He feared God, but he remembered that he had been created in God's image, and for that reason it was necessary to respect himself, and not be sappy and soft, as he might have phrased it, in his relationship with his Creator.

He remembered how he had felt when his own mother had died, and hoped that the Reverend Foss wouldn't make it too hard for poor Stud. A man needed to be alone at a time like that. He supposed he would be asked to sign an emergency leave for Stud, so that he could fly to Georgia for the funeral, but he wished that Stud would not ask for leave. A funeral, Captain Thompson felt, was nothing but an effort to comfort the living, and it was his firm belief that the best comfort for the living in their loss was simply to go ahead doggedly with whatever work was at hand.

After fifteen minutes or so, Mr. Foss sought Captain Thompson out on the bridge. "Seaman Clancy thinks he will not ask for emergency leave," he said.

Captain Thompson did not allow himself to reveal his relief and approval. "Where is he now, Chaplain?" he asked.

"He has gone below," Chaplain Foss said. "The bos'n is with him."

"Good," Captain Thompson said. "Good."

McNulty had taken Stud to the boatswain's locker in the forward hold, because it was one of the few small places in the ship where a man could be alone. He left him there when he went to look for Williams. "He's taking it bad, Doc," he said. It was the first time McNulty had come to Williams about anything since they had left Boston, but his manner was completely natural. "He's crying now, Doc, and I thought maybe you could give him something that would sort of quiet him down."

Williams went to Doctor Claremont, who gave him the key to the medical locker, and permission to take a phenobarbital to Clancy.

At the boatswain's locker, Williams shut the door behind him. Stud was lying, sprawled face down, on a coil of heavy line, crying with childlike sobs. Williams sat down next to him on an overturned pail. Stud turned his tear-stained, swollen face toward him in silence, with his twisted mouth half open, like a mask of tragedy.

"I've brought you a pill," Williams said. "It will make you feel better."

"She's dead," Stud said. "I ain't never going to see her no more."

"I know," Williams said. "You take this pill."

Stud turned his body to one side, facing Williams, and rested his head on his folded arm. "I couldn't stand to go see her put in the ground," he said. "Do you think I done right?"

"I think you did," Williams said. "You can remember her as she was when you saw her last."

"But I've been so bad," Stud said, chokingly. "Do you reckon she knows that now, how bad I was?"

"It doesn't matter," Williams said. "You've been no worse than anyone else. Mothers can forgive anything."

"She forgive me anything," Stud said. "No matter what I done. Like the time about the cake."

"The cake?" Williams asked.

"There was this cake, see, on the table in the pantry, cooling," he said. "It had thick icing on it, like I like. You know, chocolate. I seen it there, and when she went out to feed the chickens I picked up this butcher knife, see, and scooped off a hunk of icing and put it in my mouth." He paused a moment to catch his breath. "And then she come in and seen it, and she said, 'Tim' —that's my real name, Tim — she said, 'Tim, that cake was pretty for the company, and now you spoiled it,' and I said, innocent-like, you know, 'I didn't do nothing,' and she said, 'Stick out your tongue, Tim,' and I stuck out my tongue, and the knife had cut it, and the blood commence to run down my chin. Oh, it was funny," he said, his face contorted with anguish. "She's dead," he said, crying harshly, "and I didn't never even tell her. I didn't never tell her that I loved her! I loved her more than anybody else in the whole world, and I didn't never even tell her, and now she's dead!"

"You didn't have to tell her that. She knew. Take the pill, Stud. McNulty wants you to take it. Do it for him, Stud."

Clancy raised himself up on the coil of line, and took the pill Williams held out to him. He swallowed it with a sip of water from the mug Williams had brought.

"Drink it all, Stud," Williams said, "When you cry, you lose a lot of moisture. You've got to put it back."

"Is that a fact?" Stud said.

"It's a fact," Williams said.

"It don't matter," Stud said, falling back on the coil of line, his face suddenly empty. "She's dead."

Chapter 8

ON Tuesday of the last week at Guantanamo Bay, a long-delayed shipment of mail arrived from the States, brought out to the Ajax at the end of the day's maneuvers. At such a moment the Ajax ceased to be a unit and became a collection of two hundred and fifty separate individuals. For Sullivan the distribution of the mail was one of his most disagreeable tasks. In their eagerness the boys pressed around him in a smothering mob, and he would have to shout the names louder and louder above the din, and fight to keep the mail from being snatched from his hands. But when the last.letter, the last package, the last magazine and book had been claimed by its rightful owner, an intense silence settled over the ship. Later would come the talking, the comparing of notes, the exchange of news, the confidences; but each man read his mail in what privacy he could find, by climbing down into the engine rooms or boiler rooms, by hiding behind stacks or ventilators, by going far forward or aft on the deck, or, in the last resort, by climbing, clothed, into his bunk. To each man, for a precious moment, came the scents and the sounds of home.

Doctor Claremont's wife had borne him a son. He weighed seven pounds and three ounces, and he was to be called David, as they had decided in advance if the baby should be a boy. He had wisps of black hair, and eyes, as everyone said, like those of his Grandfather Claremont, He was a good baby; he rarely cried.

Doctor Claremont wept. Then he laughed. It seemed to him as if the invisible walls of a confining room fell away, and the whole world bloomed like a rose. He had to share the news with someone, and, still holding the letter in a trembling hand, he left his cabin in search of Lieutenant Palazzo.

Lieutenant Palazzo stood on the deck, leaning against the number-one five-inch-gun mount, reading his mail. There were the usual number of letters from girls, but this time one of them was very disturbing. A girl named Rhoda Smith wrote to tell him that she was pregnant, and what should she do? She had told no one yet, not even her parents. She would wait until she heard from him with a plan. Lieutenant Palazzo's stomach contracted and his mouth grew dry. For a moment he couldn't even remember who Rhoda Smith was, or what she looked like. The address on the envelope, an apartment on the East Side of New York, brought her back to him. He had had a few days' leave in New York before going to Norfolk to pick up the Ajax, and he had gone to a cocktail party where he had met Rhoda Smith, urban, smart, witty, a career girl with her own code of morals. They had been with each other constantly over a week-end, a wartime New York week-end.

They had done the usual things. They had taken a carriage through Central Park. They had crossed to Staten Island on the ferry, and run fast around the turnstile, hand in hand, to return on the same boat. He had stayed in her apartment, and they had seemed absolutely and blissfully alone in the city. He could not remember that the word love had ever been mentioned; there had been no tears and vows at parting, yet now she wrote, "There is an enormous happiness underneath, just waiting to be released when you say you'll come back to me." Well, he wouldn't be trapped that way. He could just ignore the letter. . But that might be dangerous. If she tried to trace him through the Bureau he would be in worse trouble.

It was at this moment that Doctor Claremont came up with his letter. Lieutenant Palazzo, an uncomplicated young man, found nothing of irony in the news. He was genuinely pleased at Doctor Claremont's happiness. He slapped him on the back and Doctor Claremont flushed with pleasure. Lieutenant Palazzo remembered that he had half a pint of whisky in his room. He had brought it aboard one night after a party, forgetting it was in his pocket, and when he found it there he decided that, since he had already broken regulations unknowingly, he might as well keep it, and save it for a special occasion. "Come on. Doc," he said, putting his arm over Doctor Claremont's shoulder, "you and I have got to celebrate." He stuffed Rhoda Smith's letter in his pocket, and they went back together to his cabin to break out the bottle.

Young Stanley of the black gang had a box of cookies from his mother. They had suffered a sea change, and were little more now than dry and broken fragments in a pink dust of the colored sugar with which she had frosted them. But the boys wouldn't care. Anything from home, no matter in what condition it arrived, tasted better than a feast on board, and the boys would gather around to scoop up the pieces the minute the word was passed. First, though, Stanley pulled out the folded, dusty note he knew would be there. It was addressed to "My dearest boy," and it was awash with nostalgic sentiment. Stanley crumpled the note into a round ball, swallowing hard between anger and tears. When he was sure no one was looking, he would throw it over the side.

There were letters for Pozericki, which would have to be forwarded. Most of them were addressed in the same rounded, immature, feminine hand. The mail sacks were filled with letters — addressed in rounded, immature, feminine hands, and when the boys opened them and held them, the atmosphere of the ship was oppressive with longing and sweet desire, and every man felt almost capable of swimming home.

Stud Clancy had a letter from his mother. He took it below and lay down in his bunk, and turned his face to the wall. The sight of the handwriting had stabbed him with such sudden pain that he could not open the envelope. He lay with it in his hand for a moment, his eyes closed, seeing behind the lids an autumn day, with a red-and-gold-streaked evening sky, coming home with his gun, beloved Patch snuffling at his heels, and seeing his mother in the kitchen, knowing that she was singing as she moved about from the stove to the table. After a while he got up and put the letter, unopened, in his locker. He would read it some other time, later, when he could bring himself to look at the handwriting.

Tyler Williams had a letter from his mother, signed "With love from Mother and Dad," and urging him to write to Mary Taylor, "such a sweet girl." Tyler smiled wryly to himself. Of course Mary Taylor was a sweet girl. And just about as exciting as a dish of prunes. Mary Taylor, God bless her, was born an old maid. He certainly wouldn't mislead her by writing to her, even to please his mother.

Bullitt had no letters. Williams had gone to the sick bay to read his, and it was with something like pleasure that Bullitt interrupted him there with his news. Word had just been received on the bridge that on the following day, instead of maneuvers, they were to have an inspection in the morning by the fleet medical officer in command, with his staff.

Williams stood up with a sigh. He was extremely familiar with these fantastic inspections, in which the requirements of medical standards were compounded by the Navy devotion to order. In a shore hospital the inspecting medical officer was accompanied, along with his staff, by a hospital corpsman carrying a bottle of alcohol and a clean towel, so that when the officer ran his finger along any suspected surface for soil, the finger might afterward be cleaned with alcohol and dried on the towel.

Williams rolled up his sleeves. They were to be examined in their preparation for action, and in their disposition of the medical equipment of the ship. The medical storeroom, the battle stations, every first-aid station and locker would have to be checked and arranged in perfect order, and the sick bay would have to be cleaned in the meticulous way a man might paint a room, effacing his footsteps as he backed out of the door.

"We won't count on having sick call tonight," Bullitt said, briskly pulling out the contents of a shelf to rearrange it. "I have passed the word along that no one is permitted to be ill." From the note of satisfaction, almost of smugness, in his voice, it was obvious that it was his, Bullitt's, day that they were preparing for.

Inspection day dawned bright. The harbor was glassy calm; they were a polished ship upon a polished sea. Williams, after four hours' sleep, drank a mug of scalding hot coffee and dressed himself with care in his whites.

The medical commander. Rear Admiral Doctor Hector Tolson, was a slim, erect, graying man with a manner of extreme gravity, and the two junior doctors who followed him up the accommodation ladder of the AJax wore similar expressions, but rather tentatively, as if they were trying them on for size.

Admiral Tolson had brought with him a practice casualty plan, and he proceeded at once to the bridge with his aides, in Captain Thompson's company. From here the plan was to be put into action. Typed forms were distributed to Doctor Claremont, Chief Bullitt and Williams; and to Lieutenant Palazzo, Chief Kronsky and McNulty. The AJax was presumed to have been attacked by enemy dive bombers, and there were simulated casualties on the open deck of the fantail, in the number-two and number-five five-inch-gun mounts, as well as m two of the forty-millimeter-gun tubs on the starboard side.

When the boys selected to play the parts of the victims had been put into place, with slips of paper pinned to their uniforms describing the nature of their injuries, the plan went into action. Teams of stretcher bearers, selected from the crew, had been painstakingly, if sarcastically, trained by Chief Bullitt, and they now brought the victims to the medical battle stations. On the open deck of the fantail, Chief Bullitt applied tourniquets, splinted.arms and legs, and bound compresses on flesh wounds and head wounds, after which the stretcher bearers carried the victims to the wardroom, to join those already taken there for primary treatment from points nearer that station. Here Doctor Claremont, assisted by Williams, was to decide where to place them and which ones would have precedence on the dining-now-operating table, and to dispatch those who had been treated to their bunks below. Admiral Tolson's aides followed this procedure, with particular attention to the efficiency with which the stretchers were brought in and out of the narrow passageway and carried below.

When this part of the inspection had been completed, Admiral Tolson and his aides, their faces gravely expressionless, withdrew for a brief consultation, after which they made the customary formal inspection of the first-aid stations, the storage room, the life rafts, the medical and survival equipment of the small boats, and, last of all, the sick bay itself.

It was, indeed, clearly Bullitt's day. When the inspection party gathered in the captain's cabin, and after Admiral Tolson had talked with Doctor Claremont, Bullitt was summoned. "Doctor Claremont tells me you have done an excellent job, Chief," the admiral said, permitting himself to spend a slight smile of approval from what seemed to be a rather limited supply of good will.

"Thank you, sir," Bullitt said, standing at attention before him, looking at a point slightly above and to the left of the admiral's head, with a slow, slightly scornful expression, as if a compliment was really superfluous, since he himself was aware of the superiority of his appointments.

"Doctor Claremont tells me that it was you who worked out the traffic pattern for the wounded to be brought in and out of the wardroom."

"Yes, sir," Bullitt said, in a sepulchral tone.

"I will recommend it to others," Admiral Tolson said.

"Thank you, sir," Bullitt said, after a barely perceptible pause, which seemed to indicate that perhaps the permission to do this was not the admiral's to give.

When the inspection party left the ship, and the crew could inhale again, Captain Thompson called Doctor Claremont back to his cabin. He was in very good spirits. "You've done it, my boy," he said. "Admiral Tolson told me that without doubt we are the best-equipped destroyer, medically, in the entire squadron."

Doctor Claremont looked down at his shoes, rather sheepishly. "I'm afraid it really was mostly Bullitt's doing, Captain," he said.

Captain Thompson dismissed this modesty with a shrug, "We expect good work of an experienced chief," he said. "But you had the wisdom and judgment to let him have a free hand."

"I don't know that I let him do anything, Captain," Doctor Claremont said, looking up with a half-smile. "I didn't seem to have much choice."

Captain Thompson laughed and got up from his desk, and came around to clap Doctor Claremont on the shoulder. "That remark almost makes me think you'll be a Navy man yet, in spite of yourself," he said. "Every officer learns in time that his chief is sort of like a second wife. You have to let him have his own way a good part of the time to keep peace in the family."

And so Bullitt's triumph was complete. That evening, his euphoric state maintained by pride or by alcohol or by both, he announced to Williams that he would go ashore with him on liberty to celebrate. The idea did not appeal strongly to Williams. Bullitt's triumph affected him oddly. It left him with a bad taste in his mouth, a feeling almost of depression, which he did not understand. Wasn't Bullitt's triumph a vindication of his own defense of the chief? Yet it seemed anticlimactic. There was no satisfaction in a victory that the victor claimed in advance as his rightful due.

He could think of no valid reason to refuse to go with the chief. And, besides, he remembered how Bullitt had looked the day before, after the mail had been distributed. Reading his own letter in the sick bay, Williams had seen him walking alone on the deck, looking disdainful and bored, until he had found an excuse to interrupt Williams with the news of the coming inspection. This was all the life Bullitt had, a life as cloistered and removed from the larger world as if he were a monk in a monastery. He could not refuse to share this moment of triumph with him.

They went ashore in the small boat together and walked up the long path toward the base commissary. They had learned from Kerensky that the native workmen employed by the base for construction sometimes managed to smuggle in contraband rum in empty soft-drink bottles, and if you were fortunate you might meet one of them on this path. It was excellent rum, Kerensky said. After his tonsillectomy he had thought his throat would never heal or feel the same again. To eat soft food was painful and even to swallow was an effort. But one evening he had been approached by a workman on the path, and he had bought a Coke-bottle of rum, and had sat down on a rock and drunk it down. This story came out when the usually taciturn Kerensky had come to the sick bay the following day for a routine examination of his throat, and Doctor Claremont had been startled to see the scar tissue suddenly gone. "It burned like hell going down. Doctor," Kerensky said, "but it sure does feel better now." It was one of the few times that Doctor Claremont, at least before the birth of his son, had ever been known to laugh. "I don't know that I could recommend it officially," he said, "but it certainly seems to have done the trick."

And, halfway to the commissary, a workman did step out from behind the shrubbery, just ahead of them, and Williams bought a Coke-bottle of rum for two dollars. He insisted on paying for it, possibly from his feeling of guilt at not being able to rise to the occasion, and as they drank from it, passing it from hand to hand, he hoped that it would lighten his mood and raise his spirits.

A shipment of French perfume had been received at the base commissary, where, since the base was outside the continental limits of the United States, the boys might buy it without tax to take home as gifts. A long line of hopeful lovers waited at the counter, and Williams, since he could think of nothing else to do, joined them. When he was third in line, the supply ran out.

He turned away without disappointment, and with Bullitt went back down the path. They had finished the rum, and Bullitt began to sing. "My repertoire is vast," he said, "although I do have some trouble with the words." He began to shout out "O Sole Mio,'' but since these three words were all the words he seemed to know of the aria, the effect was monotonous, even if loud. He was, Williams could see, almost drunk.

Ahead of them, near the shore, they could see the lights of the refreshment area. Under flowering trees, looking theatrical above the glaring light of the unshaded bulbs, tables and benches of wood, faded by weather, were set out. Here the boys from the ships at anchor in the bay could sit and drink beer and eat sandwiches prepared by native cooks. The sandwiches were called "cube steak," but the boys, who ate them anyway, were convinced that the steak was actually goat's meat. The tables were crowded, and raucous with noise and laughter. Bullitt bought beer, and he and Williams squeezed in at the end of one of the long tables. Most of the others, like themselves, had come from the commissary, and their loot was placed on the table in front of them; native maracas, castanets stamped with the Marine Corps insignia, identification bracelets intended to enslave some distant, longed-for girl, the eternal, garish pillow cover dedicated to Mother, and bottles of perfume.

Bullitt, his voice raised above the din, lucid with the first phase of intoxication, began to talk to a young coxswain beside him. "Are you sure your girl friend is the right type for this perfume?" he asked, his tone doubtful, picking up the bottle from in front of the coxswain and examining its label.

"Huh?" the ruddy coxswain answered, his mouth stuffed with goat's-meat cube steak.

"Perfume is a very personal gift," Bullitt said, in a rather patronizing, confiding tone. "Mercy, you can offend a girl with the wrong type of perfume." He put the perfume bottle down.

An uneasy hush fell on the group within immediate hearing. "Whad'ya mean, Chief?" the young coxswain asked.

Bullitt shrugged and took a long pull from his bottle of beer. "Perfume has its own language," he said. "Especially French perfume. That perfume might insult a nice girl, but I suppose you've got a girl you couldn't insult, even with French perfume."

The young coxswain flushed scarlet, and a shout of laughter went up about him. "Ha-ha, buddy," the sailor sitting on the other side of him said, slapping him on the back. "I always told you so. I always said she was that kind of girl, didn't I, buddy, huh?"

The flushed young coxswain was on his feet, fists doubled. "You take that back!" he said. "I'll beat the hell out of you!"

The fight was on, Bullitt sat elegantly as it milled around him, holding himself erect and protecting his bottle of beer, as now and again the fighting boys fell against him. But meanwhile an opportunist, of the sort to be found on almost every ship, had taken over at the table. He was busy buying up the perfume from suddenly nervous owners. Bullitt waited until all the perfume bottles in their cardboard cartons were piled in front of the speculator, and, as he was about to scoop them up and leave, Bullitt reached over with a proprietary air and deftly took one. "My cut, sir," he said grandly, with a nod of his head. The buyer looked up at him, with the sharp, calculating look of his nature; then he laughed at the joke, gathered up the rest of the bottles, and went off in the dark.

"Here," Bullitt said, handing the bottle to Williams.

"No, Chief," Williams said. "I don't want it. Not that way."

"Take it," Bullitt said. He was very drunk now, and his face clouded in a moment of anger. A crowd had gathered, and the fight still went on around them, the grunting and scuffling, the crack of knuckles on flesh and bone. Williams took the perfume and set it down hard on the table. The bottle cracked, and above the smell of beer and fried meat and male bodies rose the heady, hothouse scent of French perfume.

But now the coxswain had won the fight. He had defended his lady's honor. His face was swollen; blood trickled from his nose and from the corner of his mouth, but he stood, feet braced wide, his bruised fists at his sides, in triumph over his fallen foe.

Someone struck up a tune on a guitar. The crowd turned away from the fight, ready for new diversion, while friends helped the beaten fighter to his feet. Williams had drunk a bottle of beer on top of the rum, and he felt disembodied, as if the scene were happening on a screen in front of him. It was like a painting by Brueghel the Elder of a peasant revel: the healthy, laughing, shouting faces, flushed with drinking, the large, work-coarsened hands clutching beer cans, pounding on the table in time with the music; the laughing boys dancing in the dust.

It was then that Bullitt decided he would dance. He sprang to the top of the table and assumed an attitude. "My Chinese temple dance," he shouted, and, as the boys laughed and urged him on with clapping, with the pounding of beer cans on the table, he began a series of sinuous, snakelike movements, standing in one place, moving his hips, and waving his arms over his head.

He was a shocking old man, Williams thought, sobered and shamed by the grotesque spectacle. He banged his fist on the table. "Stop it, Chief!" he shouted. "For God's sake, stop it!"

Bullitt paid no attention. The guitar played, the clapping and the shouting and the laughter went on.

Williams stood up and grabbed for Bullitt. He seized one waving arm and pulled him down from the table, where he fell and lay in the dust like an aged mechanical toy. Williams helped him to his feet and dusted his clothes with his hands. There were boos and shouts of protest as he led the chief, glassy-eyed and stumbling, away to the boat landing.

Bullitt lay in the back of the crowded, rocking boat, where Williams had helped him, and as they moved out into the bay he began to snore. So this is the man responsible for the best medically equipped destroyer in the squadron, Williams thought bitterly, looking down at the exhausted, worn and dissipated face. And this was the way he behaved ashore — the reverse side of the coin. Oh, better a little less technical perfection, Williams thought, and a little more humanity. What was the old saying from Proverbs? Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith? Bullitt couldn't even show gratitude or affection — if it was gratitude or affection that had prompted him to get the perfume for Williams — without deceit or trickery or the exercise of his basic cynicism about the nature and the motives of men.

And Williams was responsible for this man's being here. He had to face that. How had he dared take on this responsibility in a world so alien to him, righteously holding up his own values in defiance of others whose world this was? He should have listened to McNulty. But he had not listened to McNulty, and now here he was, in a boat full of brawling sailors, caring for his drunken and incapacitated chief. And what if orders for transfer did not wait for Bullitt in Norfolk? A quick, cold fear gathered at the pit of his stomach at that prospect. Oh, Bullitt could prepare for war all right; his whole life had been a mechanical exercise of preparation for the state of war, but, now that it had actually come, the tedium of the long wait had so eroded his character that he was no longer equal to it. How would they get through it, if they had to face it together? What mistake had he made in standing on his principles?

Chapter 9

THE SHAKEDOWN cruise was finished. They had left Guantanamo Bay, and the character of the ^y'^A:, Williams felt, had changed. They were no longer amateurs now, so to speak, and neither was the ship. Together, men and ship, they seemed to be one living organism, as if the Ajax were some leviathan of the deep, and the men who sailed her the living cells of her body. The crew seemed to have matured; they went about their tasks with an automatic, unquestioning sense of responsibility. There was work to be done, a war to be fought. Now, for the first time, Williams could speak of the Ajax as "she," and, without thinking, he began to refer to his shipmates not as boys but as men.

On the second day out. Doctor Claremont had sent Williams to find Pawling and bring him to sick bay so the doctor could examine his hand. When the first dressing had been removed to be changed Doctor Claremont had been present. He was shocked by what he found. The injury should have had immediate surgical attention. Bullitt had presumed too much, but possibly this was because he, Doctor Claremont, had not asserted himself in the beginning.

They were sailing close to the shoreline, and as he went on his errand Williams could see the land, distant and verdant under the sea haze. Up forward on the open deck, McNulty was working with Stud Clancy and others of his court. Stud Clancy was still lost, wandering, in his grief. To help him through this period, McNulty had devised a series of small and complicated tasks, to divert his mind. Today they were constructing the restraining jacket which Bullitt, in his offensive way, had requested for use in the unlikely event a man might go mad and have to be forcibly restrained.

For this purpose a canvas hammock was used. The clews, or lines, by which it would be tied up in a barracks or on board ship were removed. The canvas was spread out flat, and along the edge of either side of its length holes were cut at regular intervals. If it was required for use, the man would be placed on the hammock, his arms at his sides, and the hammock would be stitched up with line through the holes, so that the victim would be held rather like a papoose. Sitting on the deck now, with leather palm pieces, heavy needles, thread and wax, McNulty, Clancy and MacDougal were busy binding the holes, surrounded by absorbed spectators.

It might have been a scene from the Odyssey, Williams thought as he came upon them. The blue sky overhead, the glittering sea, the rise and fall of the ship, and the sun-bleached heads bent over the canvas, sewing.

When Williams came back with Pawling, it was nearly the end of the sick-call hour, and Bullitt had already left the sick bay. Pawling's injured hand, which Doctor Claremont examined, was scarred, but it had healed, and he had full use of it, except that the middle finger had stiffened and could not be bent. "Oh, it's okay, Doctor," Pawling said, with his meaningless laugh.

Doctor Claremont felt the hand again, a look of thought and concern on his face. "I think we'll turn him in when we get to Norfolk," he said. "It may be that a little physical therapy will bring the function back, but, again, it may need surgery. Remind me about this when we get to Norfolk, Williams, will you."

"Yes, sir," Williams said.

Now that his son had been born, Doctor Claremont had become less withdrawn, and even rather cheerful. Distressed by the incident of Pawling's hand, he had taken over more and more from Bullitt in the actual treatment of minor complaints at sick-call hours, and Bullitt was more often to be found in his bunk, asleep, with the scent of alcohol hovering above his head. He rationalized his desertion of the sick bay in his own way. His job, he explained to Williams, was done. "Of course," he added, "I don't know just how long you will continue to be the best-equipped ship in the squadron, but fortunately that is not my responsibility. I simply have to gather my forces for the next batch of incompetents."

Williams was not amused. In the past he had been able to rise, on occasion, to the chief's wit and sarcasm; his periods of apprehension and disgust had always been overcome ultimately by respect for Bullitt's ability. But after the last liberty ashore at Guantanamo Bay this respect did not return to him. Bullitt never referred to that evening. Presumably the whole episode was so commonplace that he never gave it a second thought. But Williams could not forget, and he was relieved that Bullitt stayed away.

So now it was Williams and Doctor Claremont who spent the long afternoons there together. Doctor Claremont, with his new grasp of the situation, was finally and at last aroused to the reality of their imminent approach to action, and, somewhat belatedly, to the necessity of discussing this with Williams. During the present war, for example, more and more was being discovered every day about the nature of shock, which had needlessly claimed so many lives in the First World War, and he would review with Williams the new approaches for treatment. And there were new studies in the early care of burns, especially flash burns, that special hazard of sea battle, when an exploding shell might send a sheet of flame briefly but destructively through a compartment. In such an instance only the exposed areas of skin were burned, and even though the surface layer of clothing might be destroyed the skin below was unharmed. Claremont impressed upon Williams the need to keep reminding the members of the crew, especially those working in compartments below, to wear their blue work shirts at all times, with the sleeves rolled down and buttoned at the wrist. With the casual dress permitted aboard a destroyer, the tendency was to discard clothing in warm weather, but unless they formed the habit of being adequately covered at all times they might forget to be prepared in action.

"What did you do in civilian life?" Doctor Claremont asked Williams one day, as if seeing him for the first time. When Williams said that he had been an English instructor Doctor Claremont seemed startled, as if Williams had unexpectedly assumed an identity for him. After that they talked now and again about reading; Williams felt an enormous sense of relief at having broken through, so to speak, to Doctor Claremont. If he could establish some sort of reasonable rapport with him, if Doctor Claremont was, indeed, going to rise to his position, then everything might be changed. At such moments his quandary about Bullitt, below in his bunk, seemed less acute.

And so the days passed. When the smoking lamp was lighted, the off-duty crew members would sit on the fantail and carry on their own seemingly desultory conversations. They talked about the liberty they would have in Norfolk. They talked about the future. "After the war" was a phrase that came often into their conversation. But, pointedly, there was no discussion of the war itself. It lay almost immediately ahead of them now, and they were trained but — most of them — untried. They still had a while to wait, and in the meantime it was best to avoid any discussion of the war if they possibly could. They were rather in the position of a boxer before a match, high-keyed and high-strung, with a nervous tension that would not be dispelled until the signal for battle had sounded.

But first, before Norfolk, they were to stop at the ammunition depot at Swamp Creek to replenish the ammunition they had expended during their practice maneuvers.

The installation at Swamp Creek lay south of Norfolk, in an isolated location as chillingly bleak and dismal as its name sounded. The ammunition depot had been placed there so that in case of enemy bombing or any natural disaster an explosion would not wreak havoc on a community. Herons and cranes stood like sentinels in the reeds of the dredged creek. Out of the brackish water rose ghostly trees, many of them dead, smothered by the Spanish moss which their bleached branches had harbored. The silence of the swamp was broken only by the distant cawing of crows and, as the Ajax moved slowly up the channel, water snakes darted back into the reeds.

It was early morning. Muster had been held on deck under a gray and windless sky, breakfast had been eaten and the watch changed, and now the free members of the crew, Williams among them, stood at the rail. There was always an atmosphere of tension on board ship on the day ammunition was loaded. The men were silent; they smoked a last cigarette, knowing that smoking would be forbidden when they reached the dock.

During the loading of ammunition all hands would turn to, to finish the job as quickly as possible. With McNulty on the dock. Lieutenant Palazzo and Chief Kronsky directing operations on deck, human chains would be formed to pass the ammunition on board, to stock the handling and storage rooms. Only Williams would slip away. A pharmacist's mate was not permitted to take a place in the chain of ammunition handlers; and so, because he did not wish to call attention to his special status unduly, Williams would leave the rail when the ship approached the dock.

It was always a pleasure to watch the proficiency with which McNulty and his boys dropped the hempen fenders and handled the lines on docking; Williams liked the expectation of that moment when across the narrowing strip of water between ship and dock, swirling from the stern, the mooring line was cast to a waiting seaman on the dock. The deck crew of the Ajax were proud of Captain Thompson's skill in bringing the ship alongside a dock. This was the mark of a good skipper. The paint of the Ajax had never been marked by pilings; no dock had ever groaned against its weight; the ship was eased alongside in a manner which gave meaning to that word, and Captain Thompson's skill in directing the crew evoked a responsive skill in themselves.

But today Williams denied himself this pleasure. He went to the sick bay, oppressed with an expectation of a very different kind, which had been growing in him during the uneventful days of their journey back. What if orders did not wait for Bullitt? Somewhere, he realized, he had crossed a line in his feelings about the chief, possibly on that night ashore in Cuba, or at that moment when he had brought him back to the Ajax, soddenly drunk, in the small boat. It had taken him some time to acknowledge it to himself, but he had rejected Bullitt, he had turned his back on him completely. He could no longer accept him on any terms at all, and the thought of going into action with him, under him, was intolerable. But, in the meanwhile, until he learned whether or not orders actually did wait for Bullitt, he must try to occupy himself.

Doctor Claremont was in the sick bay before him. From outside they could hear the sound of the gangway being lowered into place; they heard the feet of the men on deck, the trucks wheeling into place on the dock with ammunition, the voices of Lieutenant Palazzo and Chief Kronsky, calling to or answering McNulty on the dock.

At last all settled into order, and the unique silence, which was the special atmosphere of this operation, descended over the ship, for during the loading of ammunition even the customary joking and horseplay were suspended.

The shells for the twenty- and forty-millimeter guns came in magazines; the five-inch shells were handled separately, passed from hand to hand up the gangway and along the deck and stacked at the base of the gun mounts. From there they could be passed inside through the access door and down to the handling rooms below.

When a considerable number of shells had been placed at the base of the number-three-gun mount, aft of the torpedo tubes and the sick bay. Lieutenant Palazzo selected at random a working party to pass the shells inside. Kerensky and two gunner's mate strikers were inside the mount; Harris and Stud Clancy were on deck. But had Doctor Claremont or Williams been there, he would have been horrified to see who had been chosen as the other member of the working party, and where he had placed himself: for Pawling stood outside the access door of the gun mount, to pass the shells inside. Or had even McNulty been on board, he would certainly have seen to it in some way that his boy. Stud, was not subjected to being a part of the same working party with Pawling, whose unseamanlike ways were such an affront to him; he might even have remembered Pawling's hand, and the injury, which presumably did not, in Pawling's mind, constitute a hazard. But Lieutenant Palazzo, for whom the personalities and weaknesses and conflicts of the crew did not exist, had chosen the members of the working party, and they had no choice but to obey.

It is almost impossible to detonate a five-inch shell merely by dropping it. It must be imperfect in its mechanism to begin with, and, even so, it must be dropped in precisely a certain way; but the comedy of errors which was Pawling's life had reserved for itself a tragic climax. As he stood at the access door, grasping a shell with his faulty hand, it slipped and fell to the deck. Instantly the tension, the silence, the dreamlike quality of the gray and windless day were shattered by an echoing roar.

Afterward, Williams could remember little in detailed sequence from the confusion of the scene that met him when he and Doctor Claremont reached the deck. In the shocked silence that followed the explosion, one voice rang out. It was Kerensky, standing inside the door of the gun mount. "Oh, my God," he said. "Pawling let it fall." Then there was a quick disorder of running, the sound of sirens from the shore station as the ambulance came, the stench of hot metal and burned flesh, the cries of anguish and the calls of command. Lieutenant Palazzo lay dead on the deck, unrecognizably mutilated; Pawling was dead; Butler, who had been passing nearby, had been hit by shrapnel; Harris had his right leg torn away; and Stud Clancy lay in his own blood, hideously wounded in the stomach.

Williams had been sent running back to the sick bay for the first-aid bag, both he and Doctor Claremont forgetting, in their inexperience, the first-aid box fixed to the outside of the gun mount, and when he returned McNulty had rushed on board from the dock. He held Stud in his arms like a child, cradling his head in the curve of his shoulder, while with his other hand he tried vainly to hold together the gaping stomach wound. "Oh, hold on, boy," McNulty was saying. His voice was grating and raw with the passion of his grief. Stud Clancy lay in his arms without expression, looking up into McNulty's face with his blue eyes faded to a lighter blue by the sun, searching McNulty's face as a child might search the face of his mother, looking there for the recognition of his being. "It hurts, Boats," he said. His voice was light and clear; the words hung in the air like an echo.

Bullitt was there then; he was applying a tourniquet to the stump of Harris's severed leg. Williams helped Doctor Claremont with Butler. And McNulty stayed with Stud Clancy, for whom nothing could be done. "Oh, hold on, boy," he said. "Oh, God, please hold on."

"I didn't never tell you neither, Boats," Stud said, still in the same voice, light and clear, still searching the face of McNulty with his faded, fading eyes. "I didn't never tell you neither how much I loved you. I wanted to be a man like you." And then his head fell to one side, and he died, and McNulty, with a hoarse, choked cry, pressed his head to his chest.

The men from the base were on board — the bearers with their stretchers, the station-based doctor. They took Harris to the ambulance waiting on the dock, and Butler after that, his flesh wounds bound. The dead did not have to leave with such haste. The body of Pawling was placed on one stretcher, the remains of Lieutenant Palazzo on another, covered with a blanket, and the dead Stud Clancy was taken from McNulty's arms.

It was when he saw Stud's body placed on the stretcher that Williams lost his control. He was a man who despised willful violence. He had rarely lost his temper in his maturity, but now a consuming rage swept through him like a fire burning long suppressed, and, bursting forth, it blinded him, cutting off the calm, inner voice of his rational intelligence. Scarcely conscious of what he was doing, he threw himself at Bullitt. Grasping him by either shoulder, he began to shake him, not as one would shake a child, but as if for added emphasis to his words, to jolt him into hearing. "You killed them!" he shouted. "It was Pawling's hand! You killed them!" And throwing Bullitt from him, he began to hit him in the face with his right fist and his left fist, again and again, as if by his violence he could relieve himself of his own secret feeling of shared guilt; as if by destroying Bullitt he could still the voice of conscience within himself.

When hands from behind held Williams and pulled him back, Bullitt, trancelike, turned and walked away. He wore a blank, stunned look, and the men parted in silence to let him pass. Williams, freed from restraint, went for a moment to the rail, under watching eyes. He could see nothing, and his mind was so filled with confusion that his reason had temporarily deserted him. In a moment he went to the sick bay. Like an automaton, he filled a pail with water from the tap at the sink. He picked up a scrub brush, and then he went back to the deck; he got down on his knees and began to wash away the blood.

Chapter 10

SHORTLY before dusk of the same day, the Ajax made its way to the dock assigned to it at Norfolk. A funereal hush hung over the ship. When they had secured, Captain Thompson summoned to a conference in his cabin Lieutenant Commander Gould — his executive officer, — Doctor Claremont, Chief Kronsky and Yeoman Sullivan. There were many sad and inevitable complications ahead. A report would have to be prepared. There would be an investigation. The godlike position of authority enjoyed, or occupied, by the captain of a ship exacts its own conditions. Full responsibility for any untoward event that happens on board must be borne by the captain alone, and Captain Thompson was deeply depressed and distressed. Not only did he mourn the death of his first lieutenant and his crewmen; he was also gravely troubled and saddened by the blot on the record of his ship, the ineradicable stain. He was not a superstitious man, except in the ways that all seamen are superstitious, but the accident seemed to him an ill omen, a presage of misfortune to come.

Captain Thompson was accustomed to thinking in the traditional terms of his calling, and in his mind now he was saying that his "team" had been broken up. The men would have to be replaced, and just when he had begun to feel that they were on their way to becoming a good fighting ship. Lieutenant Palazzo, for example, had his limitations, as all men did, but he had been a good first lieutenant and gunnery officer, and on the eve of action this key position would not be so easy to fill with a strange officer, no matter how competent he was. Harris and Pawling had been, for all practical purposes, almost supernumerary members of the crew, but Butler had been a fair cook, and Stud Clancy's loss was far greater than might seem apparent from his role, for by his very nature he had been a symbol to the crew of what a good young sailor could and should be. The door of the captain's cabin was closed for a long and silent time on the gravity of the meeting behind it.

Williams went numbly ahead with the task of gathering together the personal belongings of the departed men. He asked Brown to assist him, the new, reformed Stewart Brown, whose quality of responsibility, which had brought him to the attention of the captain in the first place, had finally won out over his vanity. Together, in silence, they went to the storeroom below, where the hammocks and empty sea bags of the men were kept, and found, from the names stenciled on the canvas, those they were looking for. In the crew's quarters they emptied the contents of the lockers of Harris, Pawling, Clancy and Butler onto their bunks. Then, as Williams checked against the official printed list, Brown packed the bags.

There was a certain precedent, learned from experience, in doing this. The dress shoes and rolled blues went in first, the undress whites on top of that, the skivvie shirts, underpants, socks and handkerchiefs next, and the folded peacoat and flat hat on top. More intimate possessions — letters, photographs, toilet articles, souvenirs — were tucked here and there wherever they would fit (The unopened letter from Stud Clancy's mother was put into the front of his copy of The Bluejackets' Manual, where he had written on the flyleaf, in his irregular, boyish hand, "Timothy Clancy, Apprentice Seaman. His book.")

When the drawstring of the sea bag was pulled shut and tied, the knot was secured with the lock from the door of the man's locker. When this had been done, the man's hammock was stretched out on the deck. His mattress pad and blankets were placed on that, the sea bag on top, and the whole rolled up and secured tightly by the clews of the hammock. These bundles would be sent to the hospital. The possessions of Harris and Butler would find their way to them where they were, while the sea bags of Pawling and Clancy would eventually be shipped back to their homes, preceded by that dread official form which began: The personal possessions of your deceased (blank to be filled in with either husband or son) have been shipped to you.

Williams and Brown worked at this task while the Ajax made its way from Swamp Creek to Norfolk, and when they had finished they carried the bundles up to the quarter-deck. When Williams took the lists into the sick bay, Doctor Claremont was there, alone, closing out the health records of the men who had been removed. He, too, needed to keep busy. He did not want to think of Lieutenant Palazzo, but seeing the lists he was reminded that he would have to perform this same last ritual for his friend.

Even so, Rhoda Smith would never know that her lover was dead, unless she made an effort to trace him through the Bureau of Personnel. Lieutenant Palazzo had postponed the unpleasant task of writing to her, while he decided on one of the devices that had got him out of so many tight squeezes before. Rhoda's letter to him had gone down to the laundry in his pocket, where Pawling, in his indifferent way, had failed to find it before it went into the washing machine. It was an illegible mass when it came out again, and Pawling had thrown it away.

Williams waited while Doctor Claremont finished closing the records. Then he took them, along with the lists of possessions, to Sullivan, in the ship's office. They did not speak, either, and after that Williams came out and stood on the deck as the Ajax came alongside the dock at Norfolk.

The liberty list was posted for the off-duty members of the crew. The men whose names were on the list dressed in silence, averting their eyes from one another, to go ashore. They were checked off at the gangway, and they saluted the ensign and crossed to the dock, tugging at their jumpers self-consciously; they walked away separately, as if it was somehow wrong to share liberty together in the absence of remembered friends.

Williams dressed for liberty, too. He shaved and showered mechanically, and put on his blues, but when he started out toward the gangway he stopped abruptly and stepped back inside the passageway. Bullitt was just leaving the ship; he caught a glimpse of the back of his head. He waited a few moments before he followed him.

But when he had crossed the gangway he discovered that he did not know what to do with himself at all. The installation at Norfolk was so old that it had an air of permanence even greater than that of most Navy bases, and it was so large that it was a city, a community in itself. The warehouses, the storerooms and repair shops, of frame or of aged, weathered stone, were largely deserted now, at the close of the day. With closed doors and windows, blind in the setting sun, they lined the paved and tree-shaded streets with a look of timeless brooding, an atmosphere of the changeless past so strong that it evoked in Williams the image of a frame in which he would be protected; nothing could touch or enter here.

Williams had not permitted himself to think since the accident, the tragedy in which — but oh, carefully, please — it was possible that he was the central figure. It was not his custom to avoid issues or responsibilities, but something more seemed involved here. He would allow himself to think tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, he told himself. Not only did it seem necessary to defer thought or reflection for the sake of his reason; it seemed necessary, also, in some involuntary way, to suspend judgment or reaction, as a spectator does in a theater, waiting for the climax, the resolution of the conflict in a tragedy. What was he waiting for? He did not know. He only knew, as his feet carried him reluctantly toward the Navy gate, that he had no real desire to leave.

And so, at the gate, he turned back. He paced the ancient streets again. Above the buildings, darkening in the twilight, a high, light wind stirred the treetops with whispers and memories, and at last he went down to a street's end and sat on the sea wall, feeling anonymous, grateful to be faceless in the dark.

When he went back to the Ajax, finally, he knew he could not sleep if he went below. There were always small tasks to be found, if one wished to find them, in the sick bay. He polished the few surgical instruments that were kept at hand for emergency treatment. He sharpened the needles for injection. He cleared the shelves of the pharmacy bottles, and washed the shelves, and polished the bottles, and put them back again. He was still there, in the sick bay, when Bullitt was brought back to the ship, and it was then he understood what climax it w^as he had been waiting for.

Bullitt was brought on board by two men of the Shore Patrol, and it was difficult to say whether they helped him or restrained him. He was mad, or drunk, or both, and he had fallen, apparently against a curbstone. The gold-filled teeth were broken in; his mouth seemed to be nothing but a great, bloody wound.

His appearance so astonished Ensign Cripps and Billy Becker, the gangway watch, that, for a moment after the Shore Patrol had gone, they could only stare at him in silence. But then Bullitt turned to the astonished, frightened Billy Becker, and, with a shout of rage, caught him off guard and threw him to the deck, where he began to kick him about the face and head.

Next to Stud Clancy, Billy Becker was the most popular member of the crew, and when the men relieved from watch, idling at the rail, saw what was happening they came running.

McNulty, who was below, heard the sounds, and he came running too, as Williams did from the sick bay. It was McNulty, of course, rather than the ineffectual Ensign Cripps, who took charge. He held Bullitt, wild with the strength of the possessed, pinning his arms to his sides, and when Bullitt, his foam-flecked, broken mouth shouting obscenities, raised his knee quickly to McNulty's groin, McNulty, that successful veteran of so many street fights, twisted nimbly to one side, and threw him on his back on the deck.

"Now, Doc," McNulty said, breathing hard, holding Bullitt down, his eyes searching for and finding Williams, standing stunned at the edge of the crowd, "now we need that strait jacket."

And so it was Bullitt himself who was laced into the restraining jacket. He lay on the deck afterward, suddenly passive, like a grotesque papoose. McNulty and Ensign Cripps dispersed the crowd. Billy Becker was sent below to nurse his wounds, and MacDougal, who relieved him, went to the dock, as instructed, to telephone for an ambulance.

In the unshaded glare of the lights above the gangway, Williams knelt beside Bullitt and bathed his face. He stared up at Williams, his head supported by a first-aid bag that Williams had brought from the sick bay with the washbasin, and, even though his eyes held a deceptively rational look, Williams knew that Bullitt did not know who he was.

"I went to the office," Bullitt said, "but they wouldn't give me my orders." His words were blurred and almost incomprehensible as they came from the swollen mouth. Williams, bathing his face, leaned closer to hear.

"I want you to go and get them for me," Bullitt said. "Do you hear that?"

"Yes, Chief," Williams said. "I hear you."

"Go to Doctor Brainard, and tell him I'm ready," Bullitt said. "But they won't give me my orders."

"Yes, Chief," Williams said,

"They've hidden them, or burned them," Bullitt said. "I know that. They're jealous of me."

"Yes, Chief," Williams said.

"I've had trouble with my orders before," Bullitt said. "It's because they hate me."

Williams could say nothing.

"They know I'm better than they are," Bullitt said. "That's why they hate me."

Again Williams could not answer.

"Go to the office," Bullitt said. "Tell Doctor Brainard that I'm ready…"

And then, siren screaming, the ambulance came. Its driver, a hospital corpsman, came on board with a stretcher, and he and Williams lifted Bullitt into it, in the hammock strait jacket, and carried their burden, the monstrous papoose, across the gangway.

A chief pharmacist's mate stood waiting at the rear of the ambulance, beside the open door. He was an old Navy hand, healthy and relaxed, with a bland, sun-bronzed face; a stable, unemotional man, but when he saw the figure on the stretcher he started, and came forward. "My God, it's Bullitt," he said. "Put him down, boys."

They lowered the stretcher to the ground, and the chief knelt beside him. "Alex," he said, putting one hand on the canvas covering Bullitt's shoulder, "it's Dick. Dick Macy. What the hell have they done to you, boy?"

Bullitt stared up at him with vacant, senseless eyes. "They won't give me my orders," he said. "Go to the office. Tell Doctor Brainard I'm ready, but they won't give me my orders."

"It's Dick Macy, Alex," Chief Macy said. "Pull yourself together." He gave the bound shoulder a little shake. "Don't you remember old Dick, boy?"

Bullitt stared up at him and an expression of anger came over his tormented face. His eyes blazed again, and he struggled to rise. "I tell you, they can't get away with it," he said. "Go get Doctor Brainard! Tell him that one of them has burned my orders!"

"Easy, boy." Chief Macy said, holding him back. "Easy does it, boy." He stood up, and nodded his head, and Williams and the ambulance driver raised the stretcher, with Bullitt shouting again, and slid it into the ambulance.

When they had closed the door, and the driver had gone around to the front. Chief Macy took out a package of cigarettes. He offered one to Williams and took one for himself, and lighted a match for both. He shook his head. "It gets some," he said. "The life, you know. And to think," he went on, shaking his head again, "that at one time they said he was the finest medical chief in the Navy. It's a good thing that old Brainard isn't here to see him now,"

"Where is he?" Williams asked, holding his cigarette to his lips with a trembling hand.

"Why, he's dead, boy," Chief Macy said, with surprise, as if he should have known. "He was killed beside me, when a shell hit our station. I went with him, you know, instead of—" and he stopped and nodded his head toward the closed ambulance. Then he began to shake his head again. "Doc Brainard used to say that the hardest thing he ever did in his life was take Bullitt's name off that draft. I still remember the way he looked the day he sat at his desk and did it. 'Macy,' he said. 'Some men never grow up. This is where we have to separate the men from the boys.'"

Chief Macy flicked his cigarette to the ground and trod on it, deliberately, mechanically. He turned away with a slight gesture of his shoulders, of dismissal or acceptance. "Well, it gets some," he said, swinging up into the ambulance.

Williams went back on board when the ambulance had gone, and McNulty found him on the fantail, leaning against the racked depth charges in the shadows, so that no one would see him when he cried.

"Come on, Doc," McNulty said, putting his heavy, friendly hand on his shoulder. "We got to face up to it, Doc. It's done. We can't undo it. We got to face up to it."

Williams did not turn. It was years since he had cried, and he couldn't stop now until the crying had finished itself.

McNulty's hand was still on Williams' shoulder. "I could hate you for it, Doc," he said. "You wouldn't listen to me when I knew you were wrong, but you did what you thought you had to do, and I guess you can't ask more of a man than that. So I can't hate you. Doc. We're in this together, and we got to see it through. We got to win this damn war."

Williams still wept. He could see in his mind's eye the face of Stud Clancy, illumined with the wonder of dying, and he could see the haunted, broken face of Chief Bullitt, and he wondered if the time would ever come when, behind his closed eyes, he would be able to see anything else at all.

Chapter 11

SOME WEEKS later the Ajax sailed, at last, from Norfolk. Captain Thompson, presumably, knew their orders and their ultimate destination, but the crew knew nothing except that finally they were heading into action. They sailed on a Saturday before dawn, and after sick call Doctor Claremont came back to the sick bay to find Williams. He wore a rather sheepish air. "The captain wants a religious service held on board tomorrow morning," he said. "He seems to think that this responsibility lies with our department."

Williams went to the cabinet where he had stored the box of religious articles, and Doctor Claremont examined the rosaries and prayer books with surprise. "But how do we go about it?" he asked.

"I can go to Red Sullivan," Williams said. "I don't think there is anything about a destroyer that he doesn't know something about."

Doctor Claremont replaced the religious articles in the box. "I will leave it all up to you two," he said.

Williams went on with the work he had been doing: sewing the last of his new rating badges on the sleeve of a white jumper. For, in the end, it had been Williams himself who was assigned to take over in Chief Bullitt's place. They had reached the bottom of the barrel, indeed. At this point in the war there were simply not enough chiefs to go around.

In keeping with his new position, Williams had been advanced to pharmacist's mate first class. In all probability he wasn't equal to his job, but this troubled him no longer. The explosion on deck had been the dreaded test for him; he had discovered in that moment, when he took in the scene, that a part of his mind had mercifully and automatically shut itself away, as if a switch had been pulled, and he had been conscious only of the need for action, as he had always hoped and prayed he might be.

They had sent him an assistant, too. He was just a boy, Fred Barton, fresh from Hospital Corps School, with a month or so of experience in a hospital ward. McNulty had brought Barton to him on the dock in Norfolk; he had said, "Here's your boy. Doc," and for a moment Williams couldn't respond because he was so forcibly reminded of that day when he himself had been brought to Bullitt on the same dock. Fred Barton had swung his sea bag down from his shoulder. He had a cigar held firmly, preposterously in the corner of his boy's mouth, and he removed this and smiled and held out his hand, a confident boy, too young, too untried to be fearful or reflective about his duties. And Williams smiled too, and took the offered hand. So now he had his boy. They would have him be a sailor, whether he wanted to or not.

There was an adequate new cook in the galley, and two young seamen had been sent from the Naval Operating Base to replace Clancy and Harris. But of the whole lot of replacements, Captain Thompson had drawn the best: Peter Griswold, his new first lieutenant, was a proud, strong young man, who held his head as Captain Thompson did, and who had even been the boxer of his class at Annapolis, just as the captain had been in his day. In his satisfaction and pleasure with his new officer, Captain Thompson even had Stewart Brown restored to his old position of messenger and captain's boy — the new Stewart Brown, who finally understood what this honor meant.

Williams went to Red Sullivan when he had finished sewing the last new stripe on the sleeve of the jumper; and if the planning of a religious service was not an old story to Sullivan, he made it seem that it was. First of all, a religious service meant two services, one Protestant, one Roman Catholic. The tables would be cleared away in both crew's quarters, and one service would be held forward and one aft.

For the Roman Catholic service, Sullivan explained, it was officially directed that in the absence of a priest the prayers of the Mass should be recited in unison, on the theory that, since somewhere in the world a Mass was being said at any given hour of the day or night, the communicants would have the privilege of sharing in this distant service. But this, as Sullivan pointed out, was impractical under the circumstances, since there were not enough missals to pass around, or even to share by twos. Ensign Webster was a Roman Catholic, as Sullivan was, and they would plan a service of familiar hymns and prayers. Williams could leave it in their hands.

For the Protestant service, Williams would take a Book of Common Prayer and mark certain prayers for Captain Thompson to read. From past experience Sullivan thought he knew those the captain would like — the prayers "For Our Country," "For Every Man in His Work," and "For the Navy." The Protestants could join in "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and close with "The Navy Hymn."

Sunday dawned bright and clear, with a cloudless sky and a deep blue, calm sea. McNulty sounded the call over the public-address system. His boatswain's pipe managed to have a Sunday sound, and his voice was solemn. "Now, hear this," he said, firmly. "Roman Catholic services are being held in the after crew's quarters. Protestant services are being held in the forward quarters. The smoking lamp is out throughout the ship while services are being held."

Williams found a place on the last bench of the crowded forward quarters. He was suddenly more moved than he realized he would be, and he wanted as much privacy as he could find. The voices boomed out in "Onward, Christian Soldiers," the volume covering up their uncertainty about the words. Afterward the silence seemed intense, and the creaking of the ship, the gentle sound of the sea against the plates made a kind of counterpoint behind the voices raised in the Lord's Prayer. Then Captain Thompson stood before the group, his neck straight, his chin held in, his shoulders square. In the prayer "For the Navy" his voice was firm and without sentiment as he read, ''Preserve them from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy; that they may be a safeguard unto the United States of America, and a security for such as pass on the seas…" The little congregation stood to sing "The Navy Hymn," and as the young, full-blooded voices sounded out with ''Eternal Father, strong to save. Whose arm hath bound the restless wave," Williams bowed his head, his face wet with sudden tears. A prayer and an image formed in his mind, the image of a man forever engraved on his memory. He had not seen Bullitt again before they sailed. When he had gone to the hospital and stood at the barred door of the ward, he had been unable to bring himself to go in. He had been too disturbed even to follow very well the words of the diagnosis that the hospital corpsman on duty had read to him, from Bullitt's chart, through the bars. The technical words did not matter very much anyway; only the hopelessness of them mattered. It was fairly certain that Bullitt would never be free again. When his face had healed, when his teeth had been repaired, he would be taken to Washington, to St. Elizabeth's Hospital, that walled island of the living dead, "And oh, God, bring peace," Williams prayed, "to his stubborn, willful soul."

In later years, on those wakeful nights when he paced the college campus, Tyler Williams often reflected on the lamentable truth that the condition of war was agreeable to most men. It was a sorrowful conclusion. War was evil; it destroyed not only the innocent, it also, in time, destroyed the men who gave themselves to it, if they had chosen the condition of war as a way of life. It attracted certain men because the reward of wearing a uniform for a lifetime was not only a suspension of the obligation of living in the world on the same terms as other men; it was also a release from the troubling responsibility of being an individual. Only the role mattered, not the mind of the man inside. Bullitt, in his own way, was a casualty of war; not of any war, but of war itself; Williams had seen that for an instant; the abyss, the dark void behind his eyes as he lay, bound, on the deck of the Ajax.

But he had seen it in himself, too, that capacity, that involuntary willingness, which must exist in some degree in all men, to surrender his own identity in order to save himself from the difficult consequences of a free and independent life. The memory of Bullitt on the deck would take him beyond, to earlier in the same evening, when he had sat on the sea wall in the Navy Yard, unable to bring himself to go beyond its gates, as if, inside the closed world of the Navy, the tragedy in which he was involved might resolve itself in its own terms. He had felt anonymous sitting there, and that feeling had comforted him. Yet suddenly, that night, that anonymity had been frightening to him; he had felt his existence threatened, for he had seen that what was comforting about this obliteration of personality was the soul-destroying concept that only duty mattered, not responsibility for the deed.

He would never resolve in his mind his place in the tragedy of Bullitt, or what part of the responsibility he must assume for the deaths of Stud Clancy and Pawling and Palazzo. He would have to live with this for all his life, but it was his own life, his own identity. He would take it up willingly, with its burdens, because the alternative was untenable.

And yet it was true that war had always been the most exciting crucible in which the characters of young men were forged, and as long as this remained so, men like Bullitt would be needed, to guard the coals over the years in between. And who was to judge him? Who was there to judge Alexander Bullitt?

Certainly not Tyler Williams, as he told himself. For he was as guilty as any man, on these wakeful nights, when he took up his memories of the Navy with a secret pleasure, like an egg to warm in his hands. But they had all been young then, he would plead before the implacable tribunal of his conscience. They had passed through the fire together, and he possessed forever the memory of the men who had served with him, caught for an immortal moment in the vigor and the symmetry of their youth, like figures on a marble frieze.

When the clock chimed in the steeple he would go home again, back to the peace and the deep happiness of his life. He would go into his study, and, with the guilt of a man who is forever drawn back to some fateful scene of his past, with a pleasure which no rational argument could ever take from him, he would turn on the light, and stand, and read again the copy of a document which he had framed above his desk. In this final evidence, he could always see what those days of the shakedown cruise had meant.

THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY

Washington

The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Presidential Unit Citation to the USS AJAX for service as set forth in the following

Citation:

"For outstanding performance in action as a destroyer during operations against enemy aggressor forces in the North Sea and the North Atlantic at a crucial period in the turning point of World War II. The fortitude under great hardship, the superb teamwork, and the unrelenting determination of her gallant officers and men were contributing factors in the success of an operation of great magnitude, and reflect the highest credit upon the USS AJAX, and the United States Naval Service."

For the President, Secretary of the Navy

End of book

Content

Bentz Plagemann
THE STEEL COCOON

Producer's Note

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE STEEL COCOON

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11